Rick Pitino has an interesting idea about how this UK basketball season might go
Mark Pope knew exactly what his Kentucky Wildcats would be in for Saturday afternoon.
And the UK basketball coach knew exactly how his Cats would need to play if they were going to have any chance of walking away with a win over Rick Pitino’s St. John’s Red Storm.
Pope had one vision for this UK squad in the preseason. The circumstances of the past several weeks led him to accept that a totally different style would need to be embraced.
“Smash. Mouth. Basketball,” Pope said of that approach two days before the St. John’s game, putting a little extra emphasis on each word, a somewhat gleeful tone in his voice.
Pope’s definition of this brand of ball, particularly against Pitino’s team?
“I think it’s gonna be really fun and ugly and gruesome and brutal and violent,” he said. “And it’s awesome. It’s great. And it won’t be forever. It’s just for now. Just for now.”
Kentucky’s 78-66 win over the 22nd-ranked Johnnies was all of that. There were flagrant fouls and technical fouls and ejections. UK was whistled for 25 fouls. St. John’s was called for 24. There were 54 free throws, 16 steals, 12 blocked shots and bodies all over the floor.
Pope said a week and a half earlier that his Cats didn’t know how to compete. They certainly competed Saturday afternoon in Atlanta, with Jayden Quaintance returning from major knee surgery and Jaland Lowe shaking off another shoulder injury to help lead the way.
The final result impressed Pope’s former coach.
“I’m really proud of Mark,” Pitino said. “I think he’s done a brilliant thing, with changing the whole mindset of the team. ‘Let’s be tough. Let’s be physical.’ Doesn’t surprise me he makes the change. That’s why he’s a Rhodes Scholar candidate.”
Pope has made clear that this change in style is a temporary thing. He’s said that he thinks this can still be a great shooting team. He sounds like a coach that’s still hoping to play some version of his beautiful game from the 2024-25 season.
His mentor sounded like a man convinced of something else.
Pitino said Pope came into this season thinking he had a great shooting team. “And it’s obvious that it’s probably just an average shooting team,” the St. John’s coach concluded.
All the evidence supports the Hall of Fame coach, though the “average” descriptor might be kind. UK is shooting 31.8% from 3-point range this season. That’s bad enough. The Cats’ hit rate against the six high-major teams they’ve played is much worse. In those matchups, they’re 24.3%, with just 5.7 makes per game.
That remains a small sample size, as Pope likes to point out, but it doesn’t offer much hope that these Wildcats will approach the numbers put up by last season’s team, which shot 37.5% from deep — 37.8% against top-50 opponents — and set a school record for made 3-pointers.
The last two games do offer some hope that perhaps Pope’s Cats can win a different way.
Down seven points at halftime to Indiana two Saturdays ago, Kentucky outscored the Hoosiers 40-21 in the second half. The Cats were only 2 for 6 from deep in that period, but they imposed their will in the paint, winning second-chance points 11-4 and playing their best defense of the season against a quality opponent.
Down seven points at halftime to St. John’s, the Wildcats outscored Pitino’s team 53-34 in the second half. The analytics say it was their best all-around game against a good team this season. They shot 3 for 10 from deep in that high-scoring second half. Not exactly a perimeter onslaught. Twenty-two of their points came in the paint, and 14 more came on free throws.
This time around, Pope was pleased with the entire effort, even during a first half that yielded only 25 points.
“We made some mistakes defensively, but our toughness and energy was there the whole time,” he said.
In the second half, the Cats played their best ball of the season. They did it without bombing 3s, and perhaps that’s the best blueprint moving forward for this particular Kentucky team.
Lowe, who played only seven seconds — one defensive possession — in the first half after injuring his right shoulder for the third time in two months, played 14 minutes and 34 seconds after halftime, and his presence completely changed Kentucky’s offensive attack.
The Cats were able to get out in transition — they beat St. John’s 11-0 in fast-break points in the second half — and Lowe’s ability to keep a defense on its collective toes clearly creates more space for guys like Otega Oweh and Kam Williams to operate on the wings.
But even with Lowe, it doesn’t look like this UK offense will be capable of the style that Pope’s team played last season. And his ability to stay on the court appears to be a day-to-day thing.
All of Kentucky’s big men are capable passers, but none appear to have the ability of an Amari Williams, who acted as a 7-foot wizard on the perimeter last season, at times the closest thing the Cats had to a point guard and excelling in that role.
Rather than trying to run back that style, it appears that — with this personnel — Pope’s best path forward might be to muck it up as much as possible. That’s what worked Saturday, when he often trotted out lineups featuring two big men — some combination of Quaintance, Brandon Garrison and Malachi Moreno — with 6-foot-7 strongman Mouhamed Dioubate playing a key role once again.
Quaintance was a revelation around the rim, cleaning up his teammates’ misses and pushing around the Johnnies in his first game back from a torn ACL. St. John’s enforcer Zuby Ejiofor — a 6-9, 245-pound senior known for his toughness — was clearly frustrated by the 18-year-old sophomore.
Afterward, Pitino, who knows the demands of UK basketball fans as well as anyone, said the sportswriters in the room — and the fans listening at home — needed to learn a lesson about how the Wildcats’ season had gone to that point.
“You can’t be a great basketball team without two of your best players,” he said of Lowe and Quaintance. “... I think everybody really exaggerates one game or two games or three games. Kentucky got blown out, and usually Kentucky doesn’t get blown out of any game. OK. But you have to look at it — when they come back — two gigantic pieces.”
Quaintance wasn’t around for any of UK’s previous losses. Lowe missed the defeats against Michigan State and North Carolina, and the tone was set for the 35-point loss to Gonzaga before he even checked into the game. Dioubate was sidelined against UNC and the Zags with a sprained ankle.
With his full complement of players, Pope found a winning combination Saturday in Atlanta.
It just might not have been the style he envisioned when he put it all together in the spring.
“So, they’re gonna be a very good basketball team,” Pitino said. “They’re gonna have to keep playing smashmouth basketball, and play like that physical team. And I give Mark all the credit in the world. Because he’s a big believer in finesse, big believer in shooting the 3. And he said, ‘Look, it’s not working. Let’s change, man.’ So I give Mark a lot of credit.”
It’s becoming clear that Pope’s best lineup will feature Lowe, Oweh, Dioubate and Quaintance. No matter which player is added to that group — Denzel Aberdeen? Collin Chandler? Kam Williams? — that’s not five that will be filling it up from deep.
But this team can win big in a different way.
After Dioubate was ejected for his second technical foul — this one for jawing with Ejiofor after a basket in the final seconds — the UK forward headed over to the bench with a smile on his face. What Dioubate did against St. John’s and Indiana — battling for boards, hitting the floor for loose balls, sticking up for his teammates — is an identity.
When he got toward the end of the UK bench after being ejected, Dioubate threw his arms in the air and called for the Cat fans in Atlanta to bring even more noise. They obliged. That reaction said they liked what they saw. And, even though it wasn’t Pope’s beautiful game, they would happily embrace this identity if it meant a return to winning.
“I have so much confidence in this staff and in this group of players,” Pope said. “It’s just been slow for us to figure out and embrace who exactly we are. And we’re in that process. We’re in the early stages of that process. This is an important day for us, because — now in back-to-back games — our guys have shown some real resilience and some grit and some physicality and some smashmouth basketball that sometimes is ugly, but sometimes it’s beautiful. Like it was, in moments, in the second half of this game.
“So I love the journey of a season. And, even when it’s bad, I love the pain of it, because it makes these nights awesome. And I think this group has a chance to have a lot more of these nights. I think it does. I really do.”
