‘Kept hammering away.’ Inside UK basketball’s second half comeback at LSU
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- UK basketball overcame an 18-point second half deficit to win on the road at LSU.
- The Wildcats won on a buzzer-beating shot by Malachi Moreno.
- With the win, Kentucky improves to 11-6 overall and 2-2 in SEC games.
In the moments after exultation, exhaustion sets in.
For three members of the Kentucky men’s basketball program perched at the podium inside the Pete Maravich Assembly Center on Wednesday night, that much was clear.
Faces drained. Catharsis realized.
The Wildcats — head coach Mark Pope, senior guard Denzel Aberdeen and freshman center Malachi Moreno — were minutes removed from another signature comeback win under Pope’s guidance, a 75-74 stunner at LSU that was secured on the sweetest of buzzer-beating swishes by Moreno.
The issues — and to be clear, there remain plenty of them — that plagued the Wildcats as they went down 18 points to the SEC’s only winless squad could be saved for another day, another moment. Now was all about piecing together just how the Cats — now 11-6 overall and 2-2 in league play — got up off the mat for a potentially season-defining win.
“These guys are not going to go away,” Pope said. “That’s an incredibly comforting feeling as a coach, and I think it’s something that BBN can be really proud of, is they got a group of guys that are not going away. ... They’re not going to relent, which is a gift as a coach to have a group like that.”
When LSU senior guard Max Mackinnon rattled in a pair of free throws with 19:22 to play Wednesday, he gave his host Tigers a 40-22 advantage. What followed was a Kentucky comeback for the ages.
Pope’s team outscored LSU 53-34 the rest of the way. After managing 0.667 points per possession in the first half, the Cats exploded to the tune of 1.656 in the second.
Senior guard Denzel Aberdeen poured in all 17 of his points in the second period. Fellow senior Otega Oweh added 15 in the second half and had 21 for the game while playing sick.
UK got its act together on the glass, outrebounding LSU by three in the second half after losing the glass battle by six in the opening period. The Cats got out in transition, with a 9-2 advantage in fastbreak points. UK let loose from 3-point range, connecting on 8 of 11 tries from deep in the second half.
Together, they swatted away what appeared to be a sure loss and replaced it with their first true road win of the season.
How?
“Our guys did a great job in the second half responding and engaging,” Pope said after lamenting UK’s lack of offensive movement and physicality in the first frame. “It’s a fistfight. That’s what this game is. Instead of just getting knocked around and bumped off cutting lines and bumped off ball screen attacks and bumped off post catches and getting to the rim, our guys were much more forceful in the second half. It was a change.”
“Creating for teammates,” Aberdeen said, hinting at the 12 assists Kentucky had in the second half compared to just two in the first.
LSU head coach Matt McMahon had a front-row seat to it all. His Tigers went from up 18 to only eight in just 2:16 of game time, the result of a 9-0 Kentucky spurt early in the second half that fueled the frantic comeback.
The Tigers, desperately in search of their first SEC win of the season, saw their lead shrink to one point with five minutes to play. Kentucky’s first lead of the night came on a transition dunk by sophomore Kam Williams, a Louisiana native, with just under four minutes to play. It went back and forth from there.
“I think a couple things changed,” McMahon said. “They went to a smaller lineup with more perimeter shooting on the floor... I thought when they went away from some of the ball screens and had those baseline runners — for the staggers, for shooters — that bothered us some. On the defensive end... (Kentucky) started switching everything. It disrupted us in some stretches there.”
But a chaotic end-of-game sequence nearly rendered it all moot. Mackinnon made free throws to put LSU up two with less than 20 seconds left. Oweh went 1 for 2 from the foul line with less than five seconds to play, leaving the Cats down 74-73.
After LSU corralled the loose ball from that second free-throw miss, that should have been the game. But LSU senior forward Pablo Tamba missed two free throws of his own from the charity stripe with 1.6 seconds on the clock.
UK grabbed that loose ball and Pope called his final timeout with the Cats down one point.
Step inside the UK huddle for more.
Kentucky fans would be correct in assuming the game-deciding play wasn’t drawn up for Moreno.
There were options to choose from. Kentucky’s preference was a catch-and-shoot, maybe with a dribble squeezed in, for Oweh, who made 4 of 7 shots from the field in the second half.
Normally, Williams is Kentucky’s long-distance inbounder. But he had just fouled out following Oweh’s missed free throw. So sophomore Collin Chandler volunteered and was tasked with hoisting the ball toward the Kentucky goal in hopes of finding a teammate.
Before Chandler did so, Pope warned Moreno to be ready if the ball fell his way.
“We drew it up and we had a crossing pattern at the top (featuring Aberdeen and Andrija Jelavic) as a default. But we were trying to get O a shot,” Pope said. “As we walked out of the timeout, I grabbed Malachi and I’m like ‘Hey, if we overthrow this, just catch it and go shoot it.’ To Malachi’s credit, one of the things we pride ourselves on in our program is owning our shot. It was brilliant. It was awesome. It was fun. It was a fun moment for him and a great lift for us.”
“I was at halfcourt, and when Collin threw it I saw Malachi catch it. He had a clear view of the shot,” Aberdeen said. “So I was like, I’ve seen this before.”
What Aberdeen witnessed previously was Moreno connecting on a half-court shot to decide a game during practice.
“Once he caught it at the free-throw line, I saw the way he shot it up,” Aberdeen said. “...I knew it was going in from there.”
Speaking with UK radio broadcaster Jack “Goose” Givens postgame, Moreno confirmed those details.
Plan A was a shot from Oweh from the middle of the floor. Plan B was for Aberdeen to catch the ball on the run, get a dribble in and let it fly. That all went out the window when Chandler overthrew the pass.
“To LSU, I became Odell Beckham and I made the shot,” Moreno said, with a nod to the former star Tiger football wide receiver.
Back at the podium, Moreno admitted that Wednesday’s moment — hitting a buzzer-beating shot for his home state school — was a scene he played out in his backyard during his younger years.
“You just kind of want to have that feeling, and I think that came to me today,” Moreno said. “But that shot doesn’t happen if we don’t come out with the intensity we had in the second half.”
Kentucky’s 18-point turnaround was the program’s largest comeback win since December 2024, when Pope’s first UK team came back from that margin to beat Gonzaga in overtime in Seattle. Moreno’s heroics accounted for UK’s first buzzer-beating, winning shot since Reed Sheppard’s runner at Mississippi State in February 2024.
There was also some level of revenge exacted Wednesday: Kentucky’s last trip to LSU in February 2024 ended on a buzzer-beating loss to the Tigers. The final score of that one was also 75-74.
The chaos of Kentucky’s rally doesn’t mean the Wildcats’ start will be forgotten. This was the eighth time in 10 games against quality opponents this season that UK trailed at half, and 18-point comebacks are certainly easier to make against teams at the bottom of the SEC than anywhere else in the standings.
Pope’s postgame tone indicated he understood all of this — and that Kentucky bares some blame for putting itself in this position.
But he also made sure to praise the resiliency that followed.
“We have some warts. We have some things we’re trying to figure out, but this group is a group that’s going to stay in there,” he said. “There were 15 times in the second half where we could’ve folded and there were more than that in the first, but they just kept hammering away.”
This story was originally published January 14, 2026 at 11:49 PM.
