‘Just a lot of ways we can get a lot better.’ Mark Pope reacts to UK’s loss to Ohio State.

Mark Pope’s return to New York City didn’t go as planned on Saturday night.

The first-year UK basketball coach returned to where he grew up as a child, spent part of his professional basketball playing career and where he attended medical school before getting into coaching.

But while that storyline dominated the buildup to UK’s game in the CBS Sports Classic against Ohio State, it’s the final score from that contest that now stands alone.

Ohio State (8-4) topped No. 4-ranked Kentucky (10-2) by a 20-point margin inside Madison Square Garden. The Buckeyes defeated the Wildcats 85-65.

Kentucky shot terribly in the game, making just 17 of 57 attempts from the field (29.8%). UK made just four of its 22 attempts from 3-point range (18.2%), and Kentucky allowed 36 points in the paint to the Buckeyes, who led for more than 31 minutes.

Junior guard Bruce Thornton had 30 points for Ohio State. Ex-Cat Aaron Bradshaw played in just his fifth game of the season for the Buckeyes, scoring 11 points off the bench.

On a night where little went right for Kentucky at either end of the floor, the Cats were led in scoring by junior guard Otega Oweh’s 21 points. Oweh made only four of his 13 shots from the field, but he went 13-for-13 from the free-throw line.

Fifth-year big man Andrew Carr (13 points) and fifth-year guard Jaxson Robinson (10 points) joined Oweh in double-figures in scoring in what was a night to forget for the Wildcats.

After the game, Pope met with media members at The Garden to recap the heavy defeat.

Here’s everything that Pope said.

Opening statement.

A ton of credit to Ohio State, they beat us in pretty much every facet of the game and they deserve a lot of credit. So congratulations to them.

Just a lot of ways we can get a lot better. We’ve got to execute better. I felt like our guys tried, tried to find some juice, find some energy, find some fight. We just fell really short. So we’ll take questions.

Question about Kentucky falling behind early in games and being unable to overcome an early deficit against Ohio State.

So, a couple of things. One, we just never could kind of find the pace of the game. We had a tough time finding the pace of the game.

Bruce Thornton really controlled the entire game the entire time, in every single facet of the game. So they were comfortable holding the ball. It was hard for us to manage that, it was hard for us to guard in space.

Listen, I have beautiful players on this team and people and terrific basketball players. We’ve just couldn’t find any way to put any energy into this game.

Question about Kentucky allowing Ohio State to shoot 57% from the field.

They rejected us a ton. It was really hard for us. It was just surprising, we’ve been pretty solid in that space and so, we’re an (indiscernible) team and we just got rejected over and over and over again.

It was a schematic issue on my part in terms of, I’ve been fighting to push our bigs out to the point of the screen and thinking we can manage it. And so when you push your bigs up to the point of the screen, and you’re getting rejected, the lane is wide-open.

So that’s an issue that I had that I’ve got to fix. We tried a bunch of different scheme changes and, we just, at the end of the day, I mean Thornton was too good for us. That was just today. He was just too good for us today. Kind of, everything we tried, it seemed like he had a pretty good answer for us.

Question about what injured guard Kerr Kriisa could have brought to the game, in terms of energy.

Well, Kerr’s a terrific player. He’s terrific. But we have the guys on this team to go win this game. We didn’t. We just didn’t.

That’s a space where we’ll continue to grow. Kerr’s is making a huge contribution for us in the locker room and on the bench and he’ll continue to do that. And man, we certainly need that from him.

Question about how UK will respond after this game with a long break and just one more game before SEC play starts.

I know exactly how these guys will respond. Like, they’re going to really, really try as hard as they can to not let this destroy their couple days off. Their job is to get really fresh right now and when we get back together on the 26th.

And I know these guys, They’ll come in and it’s not going to be just empty emotion. It’s going to be ‘We’re going to get better.’ And these guys will get better.

We’ve just got to keep trusting what we do. We had some defensive struggles tonight and then we just fell to pieces offensively. We just went to our default and our default is not right yet.

Our default is still bad habits. And it’s not bad habits coming out of a bad place in guys’ hearts. It’s coming from a great place. It’s coming from a desperation to help their team. But we don’t do that by ourselves. We do it disciplined and we do it the way we do it.

And we do it by making plays for each other, and that’s still not our default. That’s just a trust building process.

And sometimes when things go wrong, it can build your trust because you get to see, ‘Hey, this doesn’t work’ when we try to do this this way. But these guys will respond beautifully because they’re incredible young men and they’ll come back and they’ll work like crazy.

I know who they represent and how much it means. It’s incredibly painful to lose this game. But they’ll respond.

Question about Kentucky only attempting 22 3-pointers against Ohio State.

In the second half, man we struggled. Like I said, we just fell into, kind of, we just fell into a space where it was like “Me, trying to make a play to fix the team,’ instead of trying to fix the team by making a play for my teammate.

I know that sounds 30,000-foot level, but it was a bunch of possessions our guys wish they could get back. When they look at it be like, ‘Oh, man, that’s exactly what we don’t do.’

But it takes a ton of discipline when you’re frustrated and you’re fighting a ton of battles and when you get stressed. I needed to help these guys more on the defensive end and we just couldn’t find an answer there.

You’re dealing with all that baggage and just, you’re slippage, your default, our default’s not in the right place yet. We’ll get there. We’ll get there. This is a group that’s going to learn and grow. They’ve grown so much and we’ll continue to grow. We’ll get better.

This story was originally published December 21, 2024 at 10:17 PM.

Cameron Drummond

Lexington Herald-Leader

859-242-5257

Cameron Drummond works as a sports reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader with a focus on Kentucky men’s basketball recruiting and the UK men’s basketball team, horse racing, soccer and other sports in Central Kentucky. Drummond is a second-generation American who was born and raised in Texas, before graduating from Indiana University. He is a fluent Spanish speaker who previously worked as a community news reporter in Austin, Texas. Support my work with a digital subscription