UK basketball has a lot to think about over the holidays. ‘We just fell really short.’
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Game day: Ohio State 85, No. 4 Kentucky 65
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Saturday’s men’s basketball game between Kentucky and Ohio State in New York City.
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How to sum up the first real clunker of the Mark Pope era?
One possession about midway through the second half should do it.
The No. 4-ranked Kentucky Wildcats were down 15 points and on the wrong side of a 7-0 run to Ohio State, the chances at another comeback slipping away, when they had four opportunities to narrow the score in a matter of 15 seconds.
Andrew Carr missed a 3-pointer, but Lamont Butler got the offensive rebound. Then Koby Brea missed a 3-pointer, but Butler got an offensive rebound again. He missed a putback attempt, but then Brandon Garrison grabbed the offensive rebound. And then Garrison missed his own try at a putback. UK went 0-for-4 from the field — four different Cats missing shots — just like that.
And that’s pretty much how their night went in Madison Square Garden.
Ohio State pulled the upset in the CBS Sports Classic on Saturday, jumping out to a nine-point halftime lead and ultimately defeating the Wildcats 85-65, a nightmare before Christmas for a Kentucky team that had been experiencing a dream season until this final game before a prolonged holiday break.
The Cats won’t be going home happy.
“They beat us in pretty much every facet of the game, and they deserve a lot of credit. And so congratulations to them,” Pope said afterward. “There’s a lot of ways we can get a lot better. I felt like our guys, you know, tried — man, we were trying — to, like, find some juice, find some energy, find some fight, and we just fell really short.”
A close game early — no team led by more than four points in the first 14-plus minutes, and it was UK that had that advantage — got away from the Wildcats toward the end of the first half, with Ohio State going on an 8-0 run and ending up with a 39-30 halftime lead.
Kentucky made just one basket inside the final nine minutes of the first half — that one came on an Amari Williams dunk with about 45 seconds left — and missed seven consecutive shots during that stretch. Meanwhile, the Cats (10-2) couldn’t stop the Buckeyes (8-4), especially at the basket.
Ohio State was 15-for-20 on 2-pointers and outscored UK 24-10 in the paint in the first half.
“We’ve been pretty good in ball-screen situations this year. We felt like that was something we could utilize,” OSU head coach Jake Diebler said. “You know, we’ve certainly built a reputation, I think, from the 3-point line, but when we’re clicking, a lot of our 3s come from inside out. And so we’ve been conscious of attacking the paint and playing with poise when we’re in there. …
“So I was proud of our guys for just kind of keeping the game plan, staying in that attack mode, and we were able to get some good things from it.”
Ohio State came into the game tied for 11th nationally with a 40.6% hit rate from 3-point range. The Buckeyes went just 4-for-15 from deep against Kentucky, but they didn’t need long-range bombs in this one. The catalyst for their offensive attack was junior guard Bruce Thornton, who scored 30 points, going 7-for-10 inside the arc and 13-for-14 from the foul line. He also dished out three assists, played 38 minutes and controlled the flow of the game all night long.
Pope said Ohio State was able to get some easy looks at the bucket because of the way UK was using its bigs in ball-screen situations, but the Wildcats tried time and again to make defensive adjustments throughout the game — as they successfully had when faced with previous deficits this season — to no avail.
“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,” Pope said. “… He was just too good for us today. Kind of everything we tried, it seemed like he had a pretty good answer for us.”
Kentucky was down nine points at the half, but it wasn’t uncharted territory for these Cats.
They trailed Duke by the same margin at halftime in the Champions Classic and won that game. They trailed Gonzaga by 16 at the half in Seattle — a pro-Zags crowd in hostile territory — and came back to win that one, too. Even in the game at Clemson earlier this month — the only loss of UK’s season until Saturday night — the Cats were down by seven at the break and came back to take the lead at one point in the second half.
Against the Buckeyes, they couldn’t break through.
Ohio State extended its lead to 45-30 right out of halftime. Kentucky then narrowed the Buckeyes’ lead to 51-45, but the Cats got no closer, even with a hot crowd on their side.
As UK mounted that comeback — and other, lesser ones later in the half — the overwhelmingly pro-Kentucky contingent in MSG alternated between spontaneous chants of “Go Big Blue!” and “C-A-T-S!” and “Blue-White!” in continued attempts to help rally their team back to even.
Ohio State withstood every comeback attempt, never allowing it to become a one-possession game.
“We had a tough time finding the pace of the game,” Pope said. “Bruce Thornton really controlled the entire game, the entire time, in every single facet of the game. And so they were comfortable holding the ball, and it was hard for us to manage that.”
Ohio State, obviously, knows what the Cats had done in the second half before. And slowing them down — not allowing them to get hot — was part of the plan.
“I felt like we tried to shrink the game a little bit, with some of our offensive possessions,” Diebler said. “And I felt like we needed to make them guard longer in the half court in those moments. So, again, that’s a respect, you know, to what they’ve been able to do.”
By the end, the numbers were ghastly.
Kentucky shot 17-for-57 from the field. That’s 29.8%, by far the worst showing of the season. The Cats did well to draw fouls and convert — going 27-for-32 on free throws — but they went a season-worst 4-for-22 (18.2%) from 3-point range. Brea and Jaxson Robinson were 2-for-7 from deep, and everyone else combined to go 0-for-8.
UK’s five starters and Brea, the team’s sixth man, all shot 33.3% or worse from the field. Garrison was 1-for-2, and no one else took a shot, though Ansley Almonor, Collin Chandler and Travis Perry all played during key moments.
Otega Oweh led the Cats with 21 points, going a perfect 13-for-13 from the foul line but 4-for-13 from the field.
Butler was in foul trouble for much of the night and ultimately fouled out, going 1-for-7 from the field with four points, five assists and four turnovers, just one week after his legendary performance — a 10-for-10 shooting night and 33 points — in Kentucky’s rivalry win over Louisville.
Of the 23 shots that were designated as layups in the official scorebook, UK made only seven, the Buckeyes constantly meeting them at the rim to contest those attempts.
Simply put, nothing went right. And now the Wildcats have a long time to think about all that went wrong. They’ll also have plenty of time to fix it.
Kentucky doesn’t play again until Dec. 31, a New Year’s Eve date with Brown University in Rupp Arena, the final nonconference game of the season before the SEC schedule hits. Pope said Saturday that his team will break for Christmas — with most of the players heading home — before reconvening in Lexington on the 26th, lots of work to do.
“These guys will respond beautifully, because they’re incredible young men,” Pope said. “And they’ll come back and they’ll work like crazy. They know who they represent and how much it means. And it’s incredibly painful to lose this game, but they’ll respond.”
That grueling SEC schedule is getting near, and these Cats have now fallen behind by fairly large margins in the early going against the best four teams they’ve faced so far. Finding answers to that — and other questions — will surely be on everyone’s minds this holiday season.
UK goes into the break with a ton of national respect and a lot of potential to make more magic in the months to come. One night in New York won’t change any of that. But it sure was a bad night for the Cats.
“I mean, that’s kind of basketball,” Oweh said of all those misses. “Sometimes the ball won’t go into the rim. But you just gotta find other ways. And we didn’t today, but we will next time. We just have to find ways to just have high energy at all times, even when the ball’s not going in. On the defensive end, I feel like we could have sparked some energy there — maybe get some easy baskets by creating turnovers — but unfortunately, we didn’t.
“But it’s OK. We’ll learn and get better.”
This story was originally published December 21, 2024 at 10:28 PM.
