Mark Pope’s beautiful game has been ugly to watch. How can Kentucky fix it?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Kentucky’s offense regressed in year two; assists plunged against quality opponents.
- Defense failed to contain elite teams, yielding blowouts and stagnant halfcourt sets.
- Coaching and roster shifts prioritize downhill creation and improved decision‑making.
It was all so beautiful in the beginning.
The more Kentucky basketball fans learned about Mark Pope in the days that followed his hiring as head coach of their Wildcats, the more excited they got. There were YouTube videos that showed off his forward-thinking approach to offense. There were interviews where he talked Xs-and-Os, promising a scoring attack that would get Rupp Arena rocking on game days.
And when that first game day finally came — after months of hype — Pope delivered.
In Kentucky’s 2024-25 season debut — the first game of the Pope era — the Wildcats dished out 30 assists in a 103-62 beatdown of Wright State.
Eight days after that season opener, they defeated Duke in Atlanta. A few weeks after that, a come-from-behind win over Gonzaga in Seattle. The following week, a 93-85 victory over archrival Louisville.
But it wasn’t just the wins. It was the way they won.
The assist total in that opening victory over Wright State was the most by any UK team in eight years. In 15 seasons under John Calipari, the Cats had just one game with more assists than the 30 that Pope’s first squad put in the box score on day one.
That Kentucky basketball team was something to behold. As soon as the ball crossed halfcourt — if the Cats hadn’t already scored in transition — it was popping all over the floor, passing from player to player and sometimes even touching all five sets of hands before finding its way through the net.
Where has that been in year two? Not in the Yum Center. Or Madison Square Garden. Or Nashville. Or even Rupp. Not against good teams, at least.
Where Pope’s first Kentucky team could give an up-close observer whiplash from simply trying to follow the ball on any given possession, his second one has been making fans woozy in a much different way.
This time around, when the Cats cross halfcourt, the ball often goes nowhere.
The latest example came Friday night in Bridgestone Arena, where Kentucky suffered a 94-59 loss to No. 11 Gonzaga — the program’s most-lopsided defeat since 2008 — that served as a perfect summation of what’s wrong with these Wildcats.
By most metrics, it was the worst offensive performance of the Pope era so far.
“That’s on me,” he said of the pitiful showing.
Whoever’s fault it is, it’s become a common theme for this season.
Kentucky’s defense against good teams has been bad, too — the Cats have now struggled to guard in losses to Louisville, Michigan State, North Carolina and the Zags, the only four quality opponents they’ve played — but UK’s ‘D’ wasn’t great last season either.
That first group had the ability to bail itself out by balling on the other end. And it often did.
The best example of that: Kentucky allowed Florida — the eventual national champions — to shoot 55% from the floor in their only meeting of the season. And UK still won, 106-100, by shooting 57.8%, making 14 of 29 3-point attempts and dishing out 25 assists on the day.
That’s the kind of stuff this season’s team does against bad competition. In their five victories over mid-major opposition going into the game against North Carolina Central on Tuesday night, the Cats had an average of 23.4 assists per game.
In their four losses — to four teams that are actually good — they’re averaging 11.8 assists per game. Against Gonzaga, it took the Wildcats a total of 15 possessions before they made their first shot from the field. And it wasn’t due to bad luck. The Cats simply couldn’t get going.
Three nights earlier, UK managed just eight assists — tying a low for the Pope era — in a 67-64 loss to North Carolina in Rupp Arena, a game in which the Wildcats missed 13 consecutive shots down the stretch. (They started the game against Gonzaga 0-for-10 from the field.)
After the UNC loss, multiple UK players decried the “hero ball” they saw on the court.
“Coach Pope’s message was definitely that we didn’t lean enough on our principles, on his teachings,” said sophomore forward Andrija Jelavic. “And that’s something we need to be better at. When the going gets tough, we need to turn to fundamentals. And that’s not the stepback 3s or shooting over two players. It’s just, you know, pick and roll, making plays for teammates, two feet, two hands and just simple plays.”
In those three big nonconference victories over Duke, Gonzaga and Louisville last season, the Wildcats averaged 19 assists per game.
Kentucky basketball’s offensive woes
It’s becoming clear that this UK team will not be as offensively smooth as the last one. And it wasn’t necessarily built to be.
Pope plucked players out of the transfer portal to play a different way. This roster is, in theory, constructed to be better and more disruptive defensively. (That hasn’t worked out yet.) And it also has more guys who UK’s coaching staff projected could trigger plays on their own.
The head coach referenced that, specifically, when asked about the lack of passing from this bunch so far.
“We have guys that are more capable of getting downhill,” he said on the eve of the Gonzaga loss. “Last year, we didn’t really have a lot of that. So, you know, if you can’t dribble, all you can do is shoot and pass, and it leaves shooting and passing as the only options.”
Pope smiled there, before continuing the thought. He pointed out that last season’s team — led in this area by Koby Brea — got better and better at getting to the basket on their own. This season’s team, he predicted, should get better at passing the ball.
“And so, for us, it’s a little bit the opposite growth pattern, and that’s a place where, if we grow, which we will, then we’re going to be a really good team,” he concluded.
Otega Oweh, the leading scorer on last season’s team and one of its key drivers, thought he and his teammates did a better job of getting to the rim against North Carolina. But once they found their way to the paint, they weren’t playing off two feet and putting themselves in a situation to hit teammates with good passes.
Pope doesn’t simply want his players to get downhill. He wants them to have options — and make the right decisions — once they break that first line of perimeter defense. It didn’t happen against North Carolina. And nothing much good came of their trip to Nashville three nights later.
The Cats did get their top point guard, Jaland Lowe, back for the Gonzaga game. He’d missed the previous five games — including losses to Michigan State and UNC — with a shoulder injury. Much of the offensive approach in the preseason was built around his presence, and UK’s best showing against a quality opponent came when he was on the court at Louisville.
But Lowe’s return to the lineup didn’t do any good against the Zags.
Maybe better things will come once he gets more settled. Assuming that right shoulder — which has now been injured twice since October — holds up, that is. Oweh acknowledged that the offense looks much better with Lowe on the court, but he also lamented how it’s looked when he’s not. One player can’t make or break a team’s scoring attack.
And UK’s star player also swatted away any talk of this being a “new roster” that still needs time to figure itself out offensively.
“Even if it’s a new group, we’ve been here since the summer,” Oweh said. “That chemistry has got to be there. I think it’s just a matter of us slowing down in the moment, not letting the crowd or not letting the game speed us up. We practice every day. We know what it looks like.
“So when we come to games, we can’t change it up and shy away from that stuff that we know works.”
The good teams have also been taking away what the Wildcats do best. Pope wants his team to get out in transition as much as possible, but both UNC and Gonzaga limited that last week. The Cats could get nothing going in the halfcourt against the Zags, and that was coach Mark Few’s plan coming in.
“The best thing we did, I think we really slowed them down as best we could in transition,” he said of the 19-2 lead his team built in the opening minutes. “I thought we did a great job early in that half of doing that. They’re great at pitching ahead and really attacking the rim. They got some guys that really put pressure on the rim, and I thought we did a great job there.”
This was also supposed to be a good shooting team, but Kentucky has been just the opposite against quality competition. Against the five mid-majors they’ve run off the court, the Cats are hitting at 38.0% from 3-point range. In the four losses, they’re shooting 24.3% from deep.
With competent teams eliminating their ability to run, the Wildcats haven’t been able to get in a rhythm. No easy buckets. No wide-open 3s in the flow of the transition game.
“I think that’s when we’re at our best,” Oweh said. “That’s when we’re getting a lot of open looks. The ball’s moving, we’re out in transition.”
Whatever Oweh and others see that is working in practice is clearly not translating to the games against quality opponents. And that’s just about the only kind of game that Kentucky has left.
After the Cats play North Carolina Central, they get Indiana on Saturday and St. John’s next weekend. Then it’s Bellarmine before a break for Christmas, and 18 games against SEC competition after that.
That’s a daunting schedule. It’ll also bring a lot of opportunities for these Cats to prove their doubters wrong. That list keeps growing.
“The most important thing is not to take this sadness and anger to your heart and know that you need to just turn it into motivation,” Jelavic said of the slow start. “And I think our guys know that. And we’re just preparing for one game, and we’re gonna win the next one, and that’s just gonna be the spark that’s gonna fire up everything. And the trajectory is just gonna go up, and we’re gonna turn this around.
“We’re ready for the next game. We want ranked teams. We want ranked teams all the time. And we can’t wait.”
Jelavic said that three days before the Cats got booed off the court in the 35-point loss to Gonzaga.
There’s still plenty of time to turn this thing around, but it’s clear that there are no quick fixes.
