It was an ugly start to Kentucky’s season. Mark Pope found the beauty in it
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Kentucky produced an ugly first half yet preserved leads and focus.
- Wildcats erupted in second half with 48 points, 61.3% shooting and 14 assists.
- Mark Pope’s offense-focused rotation supplied nine scorers and high-energy play.
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Gameday: Kentucky 77, Nicholls 51
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Tuesday’s Kentucky-Nicholls men’s basketball game at Rupp Arena in Lexington.
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Most everyone who watched the first half of Kentucky’s season opener Tuesday night will think back on that 20 minutes of basketball and remember how offensive it was to the eyeballs.
Not Mark Pope. He found the beauty in it.
From an entertainment perspective, it was the second half of UK’s 77-51 victory over Nicholls that served up all the highlights.
There was the scoring flurry coming out of the break, a sequence of 13 points in three and a half minutes that broke open a surprisingly close game and effectively put the Colonels away before the first TV timeout of the period.
There was Collin Chandler’s tomahawk dunk off the bounce, a poster jam that spread like wildfire on social media before the final buzzer sounded.
There were 49 points in all for the Wildcats in that second half. Nine different UK players scored during that 20 minutes. The Cats shot 61.3% from the floor, went 5-for-11 from deep and dished out 14 assists on 19 made baskets.
That’s the type of showing that’s become synonymous with Pope’s teams. Offense. And lots of it.
And this 2025-26 roster should provide plenty of that.
What these Wildcats did in the first half, however — between bricks and air balls and just general ugliness on their scoring end — is what Pope wants for his second Kentucky team.
The Cats could barely hit the broadside of the backboard over the first 20 minutes. But they made sure their opponent looked even worse.
And for this Kentucky team to achieve its ultimate goal, that’s exactly what will be needed.
“It’s really important,” Pope said, repeating those three words for emphasis. “It’s going to determine how good we are this year.”
Kentucky’s coach clearly thinks this team can be really good. Final Four good. National championship good. But his Cats will have to be better defensively to make it that far.
They’ll have to be better than they were last season. And they’ll have to be better than they were five nights before their season opener, when the Georgetown Hoyas came into Rupp Arena and sliced and diced them to pieces before leaving with an 84-70 exhibition victory.
Mouhamed Dioubate, one of the key cogs in the new-look defense Pope is hoping to build at UK in year two, took that defeat personally. Afterward, he lamented the Cats’ lack of fight and physicality. He said he was eager to get into the next morning’s film session. He made it clear he couldn’t wait to get on the practice floor with his teammates.
“It was kind of depressing a little bit — after that Georgetown game — even though it was an exhibition,” Dioubate said after the win over Nicholls, still clearly ticked off five nights later. “The passion doesn’t change because of the opponent or what kind of game it is. We know we’re a better team than that, a better defensive team than that. We’re Kentucky, so the standard is going to be high every game. We know we were better than that.”
So Dioubate and the rest of the Wildcats got back in the gym and got to work.
On Tuesday night, Nicholls had to pay the consequences of that post-exhibition angst.
The Colonels missed 14 of their first 15 shots from the field. They went just 3-for-25 from the field in the first half. They were 1 for 14 from 3-point range. They scored more points on free throws than they did from the floor.
Seemingly every time they drove to the basket, a Wildcat or three was waiting. Sometimes, balls were ripped out of their hands before they even made it that far. Five nights after the Hoyas beat up Kentucky on its own court, the Cats turned into the bullies.
“I give credit where credit was due,” said Nicholls coach Tevon Saddler. “I thought the physicality bothered us, especially on the drive. They made it really hard for us to get inside-out 3s. We took a lot of early 3s. A lot of outside-out 3s. So I would say it was the physicality.”
That was the plan. And these Cats carried it out, looking a lot more like the team that beat No. 1-ranked Purdue in the exhibition opener than the one that lost to the Hoyas last week.
“That was something we hit on this week,” Chandler said. “And I felt like our team defense was great. … It’s just something that, no matter how the game’s going — obviously, offensively it wasn’t great for the first little bit — that’s always something we can lean on is our effort defensively and making it hard on teams to score. And that’s what kept us alive for a long time.”
Not great would be a kind way to describe UK’s offense in the early going. The Cats were almost as bad as the 32-point underdogs they were playing.
Kentucky missed its first six 3-point attempts and 12 of its first 15 shots from the field. The halftime numbers — 10-for-31 on field goals, 2-for-16 from deep and 6 of 13 on free throws — were just plain bad, especially for a team that struggled to get its scoring attack figured out in that loss to Georgetown, going 0-for-13 from 3-point range in the second half against the Hoyas.
The halftime score: UK 28, Nicholls 15. Yuck.
There’s not much long-term worry there. The offense should come. Kentucky’s starting point guard, Jaland Lowe, is still sidelined with a shoulder injury, though he sounds closer to making his UK debut. His backup, Denzel Aberdeen — a starter even when Lowe returns — missed that Georgetown game with a leg injury and came off the bench in this one.
Aberdeen is still rounding back into shape, and he still turned in a career night as a playmaker, going for six assists — more than the senior has ever had in a college game — with no turnovers. Chandler turned it on in the second half, finishing with a team-high (and career-high) 15 points and going 4-for-7 from deep for the game.
Otega Oweh, who also missed a big chunk of the preseason due to injury, tallied 13 points and started the second half with a strong, tone-setting drive to the basket. Freshman guard Jasper Johnson scored 11 points in his college debut, and he wasn’t shy off the dribble. Pope praised him for his defensive effort after Tuesday’s win.
These Cats can score. The question is whether they can stop other teams from doing it.
And while Nicholls isn’t exactly Louisville or North Carolina or St. John’s or any of the teams UK will face in SEC play, the way these Wildcats stopped the Colonels in the first half is something to build on.
“We had so much frustration in the first half offensively,” Pope said. “We were just tight and didn’t feel right. No flow. And so every single timeout, it’s a conversation like, ‘Guys, this is unbelievable.’ … Like, ‘This is incredible, what you’re doing. We should be gathering energy from our defensive success, not in here frustrated about not feeling great on offense.’
“That’s really important — that we can go get energy from having defensive success and that we cannot lose our energy because things are a little discombobulated offense. It’s going to be really important for this team.”
For Pope, that was the beautiful part of his second season opener as Kentucky’s coach. His Cats didn’t put a bunch of points on the board. But they did set a new mark for lowest number of points scored by an opponent in the Pope era. And this was game one.
To just about everyone else, that first half was as ugly as it gets. To Pope, it was a building block. If his Cats can keep it up on defense — and take pride in that — there’s no telling how far they can go.
“It’ll give us a chance to be special, if we can do it,” he said. “You know, we were treading water. We were barely staying engaged because of our defensive success. If we could ever get to a point where we’re like, ‘We don’t even care if we score. We’re getting a stop every single time down the floor.’ That would be actually a really fun team to coach.
“And, this team — I don’t know if we’re built exactly that way — but we might be a built close. We might be built close. And it’s a pretty fun way to play.”
This story was originally published November 4, 2025 at 11:47 PM.
