This Kentucky basketball team is a ‘work in progress,’ but not all was lost at Alabama
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Game day: No. 4 Alabama 96, No. 17 Kentucky 83
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Saturday night’s men’s basketball game between Kentucky and Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Ala.
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Mark Pope was barely finished coaching Kentucky’s last game before his attention had turned to the next one.
On Wednesday night — sitting in Rupp Arena, discussing a much-needed, emphatic victory over Vanderbilt — Pope looked ahead to the Wildcats’ matchup with Alabama.
“An epic challenge of all challenges,” he said to describe the upcoming road game against the No. 4 Crimson Tide, the clear preseason choice to win the SEC, a team that was No. 1 in some national rankings back in the fall and remains one of the national title favorites.
Pope’s praise continued a couple of days later, when — on the day his Cats departed Lexington for Tuscaloosa — he used the word “challenge” another umpteen times.
“Incredibly talented” and a guard that can “impact the game in so many different ways” was how he described Mark Sears, the preseason SEC player of the year and Alabama’s do-it-all offensive threat.
This was an Alabama team that dropped 102 points on Kentucky in Rupp five weeks earlier.
This was a player coming off a 35-point performance against Missouri earlier in the week.
And this was a Kentucky team still missing Lamont Butler and Jaxson Robinson and Kerr Kriisa, a patchwork backcourt that’s still very much a work in progress as new guys are stepping up and old guys are carrying more of a burden.
This would indeed be a challenge for the Cats, who were 12.5-point underdogs before the ball was tipped. And it turned out to be a 96-83 loss for Pope’s team. And Sears dropped 30 points on Kentucky.
But it took a while for that challenge to materialize.
Alabama big man Clifford Omoruyi threw down a ferocious dunk 30 seconds into the game, and it appeared like the onslaught might be imminent.
But then Koby Brea hit a jumper. And then Travis Perry hit a 3-pointer. And then UK went off.
In no time, Kentucky led 20-9. And at that time, Sears had just two points.
Sears hit a 3 and then a layup — 20 seconds apart — but the Cats answered with another run.
Kentucky led 30-18 at one point in the first half. The Coleman Coliseum crowd — sold-out, of course — appeared dumbstruck. There was even an audible “Go Big Blue!” chant amid the sea of crimson in the early going, and they had to bump up the arena PA volume to drown it out.
For the Cats, the good times didn’t last.
“The game got a little helter-skelter,” Pope said. “We got a little fatigued. We had some protection issues. We had some defensive coverage issues that were hard.
“It was kind of the whole thing.”
The whole thing culminated in a 24-4 run. Alabama’s 12-point deficit turned into an eight-point lead, and Nate Oats’ team needed less than six minutes to do it.
Oats — firmly established now as an offensive mastermind among college basketball coaches — has been lamenting his team’s defensive effort and execution, especially in the wake of a 110-98 loss at Missouri earlier in the week.
But after Kentucky blew their doors off early — 20 points in the first 5:15 — the Tide buckled down. The Cats scored only 20 more points over that final 15ish minutes of the first half. They trailed by seven points at halftime. Try as they might, they couldn’t pull back even after that.
“You gotta give Kentucky a ton of credit,” Oats said. “To come out like they did, knowing that they were down bodies. And I think Coach Pope’s done a really good job, kind of galvanizing that crew — having them ready to go. … So I give them a bunch of credit.”
Oats ran down the list.
Freshman guard Travis Perry — making his third consecutive start in place of the injured veterans — scored a career-high 12 points, came up with four steals and committed zero turnovers in 28 minutes.
Freshman guard Collin Chandler was a plus-7 in the box score, Oats — the former high school math teacher — noted, and he had five points and two steals. Chandler had scored just two points total since Nov. 29 before tallying a career-high seven points in the win over Vandy on Wednesday and then following that up with another good showing in Tuscaloosa.
Freshman forward Trent Noah didn’t have his best game, but he’s had some big ones recently, the Alabama coach said.
“They’ve had guys step up and play well,” Oats said.
In that opening attack Saturday night, it was fifth-year players Koby Brea and Andrew Carr doing most of the damage. Both hit double figures before the halfway point of the first half. Both drew praise from Oats after the game. Brea finished with 20, Carr had 17, and Amari Williams tallied 17 points, 11 rebounds and six assists — another on-the-ball-heavy outing from Kentucky’s 7-footer.
There were offensive challenges, for sure, for Pope’s Wildcats.
Otega Oweh — a double-figure scorer in his first 26 games at UK — was held to just two points on 1-for-9 shooting, all of them 2-point attempts. He fouled out with 6:49 still on the clock.
The Cats made six of their first 10 3-point attempts but went just 3-for-16 from deep after that.
A general question about those offensive woes was met with a different answer, however.
“To be honest, our main focus has just been guarding the ball,” Brea said in response. “I feel like we focus more on the defensive end, and if we do that well, I feel like the offense takes care of itself. We just trust our system, trust in our coaches and what they want us to do offensively. And I think when we’re aggressive doing those things, it turns out pretty well.
“But, to be honest, the main focus has been defense. We know that when we come and we guard, we’re going to win games. So for this group, I feel like defensively is where we got to take the next step. And I feel like we’ve been doing a good job of that. We’re just hungry to keep working.”
As Brea finished talking, Pope — as short as he’s been in a postgame press conference all season — reached out and put his hand on his player’s shoulder, then patted him on the back.
The result wasn’t what Pope wanted — the Cats are now 18-9 overall and dropped to 7-7 in the SEC with just four regular-season games left — but that’s exactly what the coach wanted to hear.
Pope — another coach with a growing reputation as an offensive mastermind — has been preaching defense all season long, of course, but the demands have been louder in recent weeks.
After back-to-back defensive duds in losses to Arkansas and Ole Miss earlier this month, Pope challenged his guys more directly — Brea included — on that side of the ball. And the results came right away.
Kentucky had perhaps its best defensive game of the season next time out, an 80-57 win over South Carolina. That happened to be the same game in which Butler, one of the best perimeter defenders in the sport, returned. No coincidence, surely.
But UK had another solid showing in its next game, closing out Tennessee — a candidate for a 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament — even after Butler reinjured his shoulder in the second half.
A loss at Texas followed that one, a step back defensively, but only a slight one, according to the numbers. And then another encouraging performance, holding Vanderbilt — a top-25ish offense nationally — to just 61 points total and only 21 in the second half Wednesday night.
“Alabama, that’s a whole new situation,” Pope said Friday. “They’re one of, if not the most, explosive offensive teams in the country. They challenge you in so many different ways. And it’s the ultimate challenge for your defense.”
It was indeed a challenge. And the 96 points on the board at the end of it didn’t look great. But the efficiency numbers for the game weren’t nearly as bad as those stinkers against Arkansas and Ole Miss — when the Cats played without Butler — and they also weren’t as bad as the first meeting with Bama, a 102-97 loss with Butler and Robinson on the court. In the past five weeks, under adverse circumstances, these Cats have improved.
There are no moral victories when it comes to Kentucky basketball, and Pope will be the first to say so. His foul mood Saturday night made clear that he wouldn’t start listening to any such talk now, and he’s made clear in recent weeks that he won’t be making excuses over the injuries that have Butler, Robinson and Kriisa watching from the sidelines.
But UK’s coach has found some silver linings from time to time. And he saw some on the court Saturday night. Then, the numbers backed it up.
This Kentucky team clearly needs more work to get to where it wants to go, especially if that trio of veterans can’t get back on the court — or stay there, when and if they do return — down the stretch. But the gains made by the guys who are left weren’t totally lost in Tuscaloosa.
It was just another lesson that the Wildcats’ work isn’t close to finished. Though time is running out.
“Alabama is a terrific team,” Pope said. “And they put us in tough situations that we didn’t respond well to on the defensive end. It’s a work in progress. This is growth, guys. We talk about this all the time — it’s fits and starts — and this was not our best defensive performance tonight. And Mark Sears had a lot to do with that. And Alabama had a lot to do with that. And we had a lot to do with that.
“We’re getting down to the stretch run, and us getting better on this end of the ball is something that we’re obsessing about, and we’re determined to do. And if we do it well, then we’re going to have a good stretch.”
This story was originally published February 22, 2025 at 11:30 PM.
