Pope pinpoints some problems in first loss as UK coach. ‘We never got into a great flow.’
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Game day: Clemson 70, No. 4 Kentucky 66
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Tuesday night’s SEC/ACC Challenge men’s basketball game between Kentucky and Clemson in Clemson, S.C.
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Kentucky won the opening tip in its first road game of the season.
On the Wildcats’ first possession, Jaxson Robinson — on his 22nd birthday — hit a stepback 3-pointer to give his team the lead right off the bat.
It looked like UK’s dream start to its first season under new head coach Mark Pope might be headed toward another memorable night. It didn’t take long for things to go sideways.
By the end of it all — in a game that started around 9:30 p.m. Tuesday and didn’t finish until midnight — Clemson defeated No. 4-ranked Kentucky 70-66 to give the Cats their first loss of the season and Pope his first defeat as their head coach.
After a 7-0 start to the schedule — and an ascension into the top five of the national rankings for the first time in more than two years — the hallmarks of Kentucky basketball so far under Pope were largely missing in the Wildcats’ first test in front of a hostile crowd.
It’s established at this point that UK wants to shoot as many 3-pointers as possible, and Pope has given just about everyone the green light to do so. The Cats went 7-for-27 from deep, including a miserable stretch toward the end with a shot to make a comeback.
This team loves to share the ball, everyone knows. On Tuesday night, the ball stuck a lot more than usual. Kentucky had just three assists at halftime and 11 for the game.
These Wildcats can’t wait to get out in transition. Coming into the night, they led the nation with 23.0 fast-break points per game. Against Clemson, they scored only eight in that manner.
“We never got into a great flow. Credit Clemson for that,” Pope said. “… We didn’t spend a lot of time looking like us. A lot of that’s a credit to Clemson for creating the environment. And a lot of it was us just not knowing how to surgically attack that yet.”
The Tigers didn’t make it easy on Pope’s team.
Three weeks removed from beating Duke — a team with the No. 1 defense in the country, according to the efficiency ratings — the Wildcats walked into a rocking Littlejohn Coliseum and ran into something they hadn’t seen yet this season.
“The first half, I think it was a bit of a wake-up call for us,” Robinson said.
“The physicality was definitely something that we haven’t seen yet,” he added a few moments later.
In that regard, the Tigers were relentless. And it set the tone for what was to come.
Clemson outrebounded Kentucky 31-21 in the first half. Over that initial 20 minutes, the Tigers collected offensive rebounds on 13 of their 25 misses and outscored the Cats 10-1 in second-chance points. Unable to get defensive boards and jump out on the break, Kentucky was forced into more of a halfcourt game offensively. And Clemson didn’t give them many good looks.
“It was a really physical game,” Pope said. “It’s a credit to them. It’s how they play. Their bigs are relentless with their physicality.”
After the loss, Kentucky’s coach pointed to his team’s inability to rebound early on, Clemson’s effectiveness in “jamming the ball” defensively, and starting point guard Lamont Butler’s foul and injury troubles as hurdles for the Cats to get going.
“So, there were a lot of different things — both the circumstances of the game and what Clemson does — that made it more difficult to kind of play with the pace that we traditionally want to,” he said.
Kentucky outscored Clemson by nine points in the first half when Butler was on the court, but the Cats trailed 37-30 at halftime because he played only seven minutes due to foul trouble, picking up his second before the first TV timeout. He committed his third foul in the opening minute of the second half and then left the court briefly with an ankle injury after that.
Butler returned but got called for his fourth foul with 7:09 remaining. On that play, he was whistled for running over a Clemson player while trying to cut to the basket away from the ball, a sequence indicative of how much the Tigers were gumming up the floor and making it difficult for UK to find offensive openings.
Pope questioned his own decision-making, floating the idea that he should’ve played both Butler and Andrew Carr more, despite foul trouble.
“In hindsight, maybe I roll the dice and play those guys a little bit more in the first half,” said Pope, who did bring Butler back into the game with two fouls before halftime but sat Carr for the final 10:24 of the first half. “That’ll be something we’ll argue about and have no answer for. But, philosophically, I don’t want to foul my own guys out.”
UK was up four points when Carr went to the bench for good in the first half, and Clemson outscored the Cats by 11 over the rest of the period. But Kentucky still had plenty of chances down the stretch.
The Wildcats quickly erased Clemson’s seven-point halftime lead and took a 43-42 advantage of their own on Amari Williams’ jumper less than five minutes into the second half. The Tigers inched away again — seemingly for good — but Kentucky kept things close enough that the game was still in question with just a few seconds to play.
But over that final stretch, the Cats couldn’t make a shot. Williams cut Clemson’s lead to 66-62 with three minutes left on the clock, and the Tigers never made a bucket after that. UK had plenty of openings. But down four points, the Cats missed five 3-pointers in a row. By the time Butler finally made one to end a skid of nine straight long-range misses by Kentucky, there were only 2.2 seconds left. And the Tigers still led 68-66.
After that, two Clemson free throws iced it. And the fans stormed the court.
In the aftermath, much of Pope’s team was cornered in its bench area. The Cats huddled up, and they found a pathway to the visiting tunnel, the coach walking his team down one sideline, hooking a right down the baseline and exiting the arena as the Clemson fans celebrated behind them.
In their first road game as Kentucky Wildcats, this new bunch got a glimpse of what’s to come.
“Well, it’s Kentucky, you know. It’s everyone’s Super Bowl,” Pope said, borrowing a line from his predecessor. “So this is our guys’ first experience here, and it won’t ever get easier. This is why you come here. This is why you put on this jersey, so you can do that. You can be everybody’s Super Bowl. And that’s an honor, but it also requires us to be great. And tonight, we weren’t quite great enough.”
This story was originally published December 4, 2024 at 1:46 AM.
