Everything Mark Pope said after Kentucky basketball’s 73-68 loss to Missouri

The transcript of Mark Pope’s press conference following Kentucky’s 73-68 loss to Missouri on Wednesday at Rupp Arena. Some questions have been modified for content and clarity.

Mark Pope: All right, guys. Congrats to Missouri and Dennis. They made all the plays they needed to do down the stretch. We’re really frustrated with the ending of the game. I thought our guys came and tried to compete the best they could. Our execution down the stretch was poor. We have to be able to execute better to win games.

Q: Mark, they closed on a 15-2 run, final four and a half minutes. Just what specifically did you see over that time, especially that last minute with those two turnovers?

Pope: Yeah, it was tough. I mean, we’re up eight, and, you know, we have a timeout and we come up and give a horns duck catch that we had gone over and over and over and just got caught by surprise. Really unfortunate at that point. And then we come down and we turn it over, sideline out of bounds and the trail five, just a poor effort on cutting and getting catches and being disciplined. And we just choose the turn normally and we get a 3 for Kam that we really like. We get a 3 for J-Lowe that was OK. We’d much rather have had – he was having great success putting his head down and getting in the lane. And then we have the two backdoor passes, the sideline out of bounds, backdoor pass where it’s just a standard action for us. When they take away the zipper, we get a catch with the five and go back to it. And then it went out of Otega’s hands, inexplicably. Sometimes it happens that way.

And the look with BG and Kam on the back door, on the other side is exactly what we like. It’s exactly what we do. It’s wide open. And we just didn’t execute it. And then… we wanted to reject the last screen. We’ve had good success on rejects and flips on that left side, and J-Lowe opted to go middle and we just – we didn’t make the plays we needed. So, really frustrating. But I am grateful for our guys’ fight. I thought they competed. I thought the game was messy, like you would expect this game to be, with that much size on the floor. I thought we did what we needed to do, and then we just had things not go our way the last 4 minutes and 30 seconds. Q: It was another slow start for you guys today. You trailed at halftime again. What’s been the biggest theme this season for why you guys have been down at half?

Pope: Well, I think I’m really stressing with our pace and our movement. I’m just really frustrated. You know, we’re emphasizing every day about sprinting to screen, sprinting to screen, sprinting to screen and it is like we’re in molasses out there. And we’re trying to simplify and dumb things down, but man, we are just – I’m disappointed with the pace and I’m disappointed with our willingness to get to a second side. I’m disappointed with our physicality ducking in. And you know, when we do that – when we turn the corner on some of those things – we’ll be good. But we’re not going to be good on the offensive side until we find some pace. We’re just not. Actually we found more space to play a little smaller than I thought we would in this game. We actually found some space to do it, and I think we did, were effective. But when you don’t have any pace, everything’s easy (for the defense). Ball screen defense is easy. Screen aways are easy. Flow action is easy when you don’t have any pace, and we don’t have any pace right now.

Q: Mark, obviously, second game in a row that Jayden Quaintance kind of struggled. What does this team need to do to put him in a better position and what does he need to do better to see more success?

Pope: I wouldn’t even call JQ struggling. I mean, guys, he’s having to play basketball (after) 10 months, and he’s coming back from a massive injury, and the fact that he’s on the floor for 17 minutes and playing with that kind of physicality is tremendous. So he’s gonna get better every single day. He’s a superstar in the making. It’s just, it’s hard. Like, this is a hard process for him. There’s no doubt about it. I was proud of him for stepping into the starting lineup and coming out being competitive and physical, and he’s gonna get better and better.

Q: What was the message to the team that last timeout? What did you see on that execution?

Pope: We just tried to keep it as simple as we could. We wanted to go milk the same reject action we had and we just didn’t, inexplicably. Again, we had no pace running into it. We just were a little frozen. And we just didn’t execute it the way we wanted to.

Q: Mark, two-part question here, What is the message to the team, as far as morale goes after a loss like that, coming off the Alabama loss, and then from you, what’s the message to the BBN the rest of the season, when the morale is down like this?

Pope: Well, it’s a hard space. This is tough. It’s not the way we intended to start SEC (play), but it is exactly what we have in our hands right now. And when you go through hard times, which everybody does, the question is, how much does it take to break you? And I’m not about to break. This group’s not about to break. We’re no place there. And the only thing you can do is grieve as quickly as possible and move on to the next incredibly challenging game, which we have on Saturday, and the effort of trying to get better, and these guys will.

BBN has the right to do and say and act however they want. They’re the greatest fans in the world, and they should be -- I’m sure they’re incredibly, incredibly frustrated and upset. So they get the right to do whatever they want. In terms of this team, we don’t have that opportunity. Our job is to suffer all night long, figure out how to do this a little bit better, get a little bit tougher, dig in a little bit harder, execute a little bit more well and move on and win games.

Q: Mark, you talk about pace and being frozen some I’m sure you’ve had teams that you considered you had really great pace. What’s missing, or why is the pace not there?

Pope: We have some moving pace pieces. We are playing a little bit bigger. We’re working hard to really just simplify everything. Just so, so simple. We’re just – it’s a work in progress, and it is frustratingly slow. It just is so frustratingly slow. So, you know, getting our group to believe in what we do and actually execute what we do and then execute when the lights are on has been incredibly challenging so far. So we got to keep going.

Q: Mark, you moved Lowe and Quaintance into the starting lineup tonight. It’s only what the fourth or fifth game you’ve played with all of those guys together in terms of the starters tonight?

Pope: It’s actually the third game.

Q: Are there certain benchmarks you’re looking for in terms of how they work together, just to see the continuity, in order to get the pace and the kind of play that you want to be at?

Pope: Yeah. Yeah. So yes, like, our second-side play was just nonexistent tonight, and that’s really disappointing. We actually kind of lost some of the physicality of our duck game, which should have been a crucial factor to what we did today. It was the first time going with this lineup. We’ll probably morph the lineup a little bit as the game sees fit all through the season. But yeah, there’s a lot of benchmarks, of those being a few.

Q: Mark, you guys won fast break points, 24-7, obviously, I know you want to get out there, but there were still times where you were just imploring guys to get down the floor. Is this stuff they’re doing in practice and it’s not translating, or do they still need to flip that switch and know to just go?

Pope: We’re having a tough time translating. I’m not sure exactly why, but we’re having a really tough time translating. And so part of it is that there’s some new, for sure. Part of it is the weight of what’s going on, for sure. But, we tend to – the game kind of breaks a little bit for us in the second half, like it did tonight, where we kind of finally manufacture some pace into the game. But we don’t actually – we do a poor job of pace in the half court. So pace is twofold. You can have pace in transition, which is awesome, which we get to in games. Our pace in the half court stinks all the time. And part of it is the personnel that we’re playing with. Part of it is the guys maybe overthinking. Give some credit to the defense also, for sure. But our pace in the half court has been like the manifestation, the DNA of who we are on my teams, and it is incredibly frustrating that we’re not finding that right now. That’s why we’re trying to simplify everything. Dumb it down. Dumb it down so it’s just incredibly simple, so we can just at least execute with some pace and some decision-making. We’re not there yet. Clearly.