Mark Pope has a vision for what Kentucky basketball should be. He saw it Tuesday night
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Game day: No. 15 Kentucky 75, No. 5 Tennessee 64
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Tuesday night’s men’s basketball game between Kentucky and Tennessee in Rupp Arena.
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Kentucky basketball has a different feel under Mark Pope. There’s no denying that.
The new head coach of the Wildcats came to town making promises of what his beloved program would look like moving forward. A former UK player and captain of a national championship team — one of the most beloved squads in program history — Pope knew exactly what he was walking into and said exactly what fans had been yearning to hear.
Nearly a year into his tenure — and with his first regular season less than four weeks away from its finish — Pope has already delivered some major victories on the court.
A 75-64 victory over No. 5 Tennessee in Rupp Arena on Tuesday night was the latest example of that.
But while Pope’s on-court résumé is already robust — the Cats have four wins against teams currently ranked in the AP top five, for instance — it’s the little wrinkles off the court that have endeared the coach and his team filled with first-year Wildcats to those Kentucky fans.
One such wrinkle: After every victory in Rupp, once the postgame handshakes are finished, the UK players walk the sidelines and slap hands with the fans who cheered them on. That scene is always filled with smiles. On Tuesday night, it reached euphoric levels.
One moment, the Cats were greeting those fans. The next, they were among them.
Moments after completing the regular-season sweep of their biggest SEC rival, Kentucky players abandoned the sideline meet and greet and bounded into the student section.
Within seconds, several Wildcats were a few rows deep into the stands and had been swallowed up by their peers. How it even happened, some couldn’t exactly recall.
“Honestly, I don’t know,” Koby Brea said with a smile later in the night. “I think I was taking a picture with a kid, and I see everybody in there. And I ran over there. I was like, ‘I want some of that, too!’ It’s always good when you can have a moment like that with our fan base. Man, it’s amazing. We really cherish that.”
Brea was one of the stars of this particular win over Tennessee.
But that’s not saying a whole lot. Pretty much every Wildcat who stepped on the court was a star at some point Tuesday night.
Two weeks ago — with Lamont Butler watching from the sidelines — Kentucky needed a total team effort to pull off an upset victory over the Volunteers in Knoxville.
This time around, the Wildcats were faced with the same scenario, but under much different circumstances. Once again, they found a way to beat the Vols.
Butler missed three games with a shoulder injury — the first of them being that 78-73 upset over UT two weeks ago — before returning in a victory over South Carolina on Saturday, and he set the tone in the rematch with the Vols.
On the very first possession of the game, Butler — renowned as a perimeter defender — ripped the ball right out of the hands of all-SEC point guard Zakai Zeigler, took it the other way and finished with a contested layup to score the first two points of the night.
Butler hit the court hard — surely sending a shiver down the collective spine of Big Blue Nation — but he popped up and ran back down the court with a smile on his face.
With 8:40 left in the game, his night ended while trying to do the exact same thing.
Butler went to the court for a loose ball while trying to complete another steal, landed on that still-injured left shoulder, and the agony on his face told everyone what was coming next.
After a few moments down on the floor, Butler got up, but this time he immediately walked back to the UK locker room. He didn’t play again the rest of the night. But like they did two weeks ago in Knoxville, his teammates stepped up without him.
In fact, they did it all night. And some of the biggest moments came in unexpected ways.
The star of the first half was Kentucky kid Trent Noah, the until-recently-little-used freshman who has become a fan favorite due to his hard-nosed play and Harlan County background. The “Mountain Mamba” — as everyone is calling him now — nailed three 3-pointers in that first half.
Each one of those long-range bombs was met with a raucous response inside Rupp.
“How fun is that?” Pope said afterward, saying he might prefer an alternative nickname he’d heard — the “Holler Baller” — before going on a lengthy explanation of Noah’s importance to the team.
Kentucky led 33-26 at halftime.
In the first five minutes of the second half, Ansley Almonor — eighth on this team in minutes — scored eight points, with two 3-pointers and a jumper helping UK end a series of Tennessee mini-runs.
“Come on!” Pope exclaimed afterward. “Like, I know I told you all he was going to win us some games before the season. I didn’t even expect he would win us this many.”
Other than a one-point Tennessee lead that lasted for 25 seconds early in the game and another stretch where the score was tied for 23 seconds toward the end of the first half, Kentucky led this game the entire way. Until Butler went down.
The Cats were already playing without Jaxson Robinson and Kerr Kriisa, the two veteran guards sidelined with wrist and foot injuries, respectively. Kriisa has been out since early December, and Robinson has unselfishly slid into the point guard spot at times over the past two months, especially when Butler joined Kriisa on the UK bench in recent weeks.
Starting at the 8:40 mark — clinging to a 54-52 lead — the Cats would have to play the rest of the night without all three of them.
Seventy seconds later, Tennessee took the lead. With just under five minutes left, Zeigler hit a shot to put the Vols ahead 60-58. No Butler, no Kriisa, and no Robinson this time.
Kentucky made do without them.
On the Cats’ next possession — with the shot clock ticking down — Brea nailed a long 3-pointer to give UK a 61-60 lead, and Tennessee never pulled even again.
Starting with Brea’s shot, the Cats outscored the Vols 17-4 over the final four minutes and change. More impressive than the run was how Kentucky’s players came together at the end.
In the final four minutes — with Butler and Robinson cheering them on from the bench — five Wildcats contributed to the scoring. Amari Williams hit a jumper. Noah hit a couple of free throws. Brea hit another 3 to put Kentucky ahead 68-62, and then he found Otega Oweh for an alley-oop dunk to make it 70-62. Oweh and Andrew Carr made free throws to ice it.
Throw in Almonor’s and-one to tie the game at 58 with 5:59 left, and six Cats hit the scoring column after Butler left the court. Two Cats who didn’t — Brandon Garrison and Travis Perry — had huge baskets earlier in the night.
“You let their bench come in and impact the game in a big way,” Tennessee head coach Rick Barnes said. “That can’t happen. But it did.”
Almonor, a reserve all season until entering the starting lineup as Carr continues to recover from a back injury, scored 13 points, a season high. Noah scored 11 points, a career high. Perry chipped in with eight points, also a career high for the other freshman from Kentucky.
Oweh also had 13 points, tying Almonor for tops on the team. That number was the lowest total for a UK leading scorer in any game this season.
“It was really great to be a part of this epic, epic game tonight,” Pope said. “It just was like — it was awesome. I’m so proud of our guys. We got guys that just want to fight and compete. And we got ballers, right? They just want to be ballers. They just want to come play. And we had guys step up and make huge plays.”
Brea, who came to UK with the reputation as the best 3-point shooter in college basketball — and is now at 45.3% from deep for the season — hit two of the biggest shots of the Wildcats’ night and once again made some key defensive plays in the victory.
But Brea made a curious comment afterward. His face filled with delight as he recounted the play that basically clinched the win — the one where he blew by his defender into the lane and flipped a no-look pass to Oweh, who slammed it home after driving the baseline.
The Rupp Arena crowd roared its approval.
“That was probably one of the top plays of my career, honestly,” Brea said.
That’s coming from a fifth-year player who has made 287 3-pointers in college.
And that’s exactly what his coach loves to hear.
Pope said after the game that several of his guys made some great individual plays.
“But the guys did most of it together. And it’s how we operate. I think our guys love it.”
He broke down Brea’s alley-oop pass to Oweh as the best example of a vision that has been months in the making.
“Like, those are not the two guys that we normally script to do that, but you see guys kind of growing. Their games are expanding and growing, and they’re getting more comfortable with each other. It’s pretty great. It’s really special. For us, it’s going to be a team effort every single night. It takes every single one of our guys. Every single one of our guys is making key, important plays. Every single guy on our roster that could play tonight made important plays.
“And I like Kentucky being that way. Actually, I love it. It feels right to me. Maybe it’s because of how we were when I played here. Maybe it’s because of what I know. Maybe it’s because it’s how the state of Kentucky works, this community works. But I dig it, man. I think it’s a good representation of what we are in the state.”
This story was originally published February 12, 2025 at 12:16 AM.
