Kentucky basketball falters late, falls in final seconds at Auburn
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- UK basketball lost to Auburn in an SEC men’s basketball game Saturday night.
- Kentucky got a career-best 29 points from Otega Oweh in the win.
- Auburn snapped a five-game losing streak with the win.
Kentucky basketball is still searching for a win to guarantee a .500 record in SEC play.
The Wildcats are now 17-10 overall and 8-6 in conference games following their third straight loss, this one coming in heartbreaking fashion by a 75-74 score at Auburn’s Neville Arena on Saturday night.
The Tigers got a game-winning tip-in by Elyjah Freeman with less than two seconds to play, after UK led by three points with less than 20 seconds to play. Denzel Aberdeen staked UK to a 74-71 lead with a pair of free throws.
Tahaad Pettiford drew a foul and knocked down two free throws on the next possession to make it a one-point game with 14 seconds left.
From there, it was chaos.
Kentucky guard Collin Chandler was called for an offensive foul after the UK inbound, pushing off on an Auburn defender
On the Tigers’ ensuing possession, UK’s Mohamed Dioubate blocked a Kevin Overton layup, and KeShawn Murphy missed a putback attempt before Freeman flew in with less than two seconds remaining for the go-ahead tip-in.
UK didn’t manage to get a shot off following a timeout. It attempted a repeat of its game-winning play earlier this season at LSU — a long inbound pass from Chandler to Malachi Moreno — but the ball was tipped before it got to Moreno, and the freshman center lost the pass off his leg as time expired.
Kentucky led by as many as nine points in the second half before things went back and forth down the stretch in front of a vocal crowd on The Plains.
The Cats led 39-35 at halftime on the strength of a 7-0 scoring spurt over the final minutes of the half. Mark Pope’s group relied on defense to build a rare halftime lead against quality opposition: Auburn made only two field goals, both dunks, over the final 10:15 of the first half.
This was only the fifth time in 20 games against high-major opponents this season that the Wildcats led at the break. Kentucky had won all four of the previous such scenarios, with the most recent one being a home triumph over Oklahoma on Feb. 4.
The Wildcats kept their defensive intensity to start the second half. It took Auburn more than three minutes to convert from the field to begin the second period. UK established a nine-point lead as a result, with a fast-break dunk by Otega Oweh giving the Cats a 46-37 edge with 17:53 left in the game.
Oweh finished with a career-best 29 points, along with seven rebounds and three assists.
That gap was officially closed with 8:51 to play when Murphy made a layup to tie the game at 53. The Tigers took the lead back with 8:13 left on a free throw by Murphy, giving Auburn its first lead since there was 2:31 to go in the opening half.
The sequence that led to those free throws involved Oweh being called for his fourth foul with 8:13 remaining.
Oweh’s stint on the bench was short, though, and he converted a driving layup to tie the game at 59 with 5:36 to play. But Auburn battled back again and built a six-point lead down the stretch.
Oweh connected on another layup to tie things at 68 with 2:01 left. Then came what looked like it might be the Tigers’ hammer blow: Murphy drilling a 3-pointer on the next possession. The Wildcats had a chance to tie it when Oweh was fouled shooting a 3-pointer with 1:38 to go, but he converted just two of the three foul shots.
UK’s defense came through in the immediate aftermath, though. The Cats forced two straight turnovers, with the final one leading to a breakaway dunk by Oweh to give the visitors a 72-71 lead.
UK got one more stop — Brandon Garrison played effective defense on Murphy and forced a miss, with Chandler on hand to grab the rebound — and Aberdeen knocked down two free throws to make it 74-71 Cats with 18.8 seconds to play.
That set up the chaos in the closing seconds.
A potential hinge point for Kentucky in Saturday’s game — the Wildcats’ resurgent 3-point shooting against Auburn’s normally porous 3-point defense — never materialized.
Kentucky entered the game as the best 3-point shooting team in SEC games, having connected on 36.7% of its tries from deep in 13 previous games against conference opponents. UK also entered the contest fresh off its best showing from deep in an SEC game, having gone 12-from-30 from distance in Tuesday’s home loss to Georgia.
Conversely, Auburn entered Saturday’s contest with the worst 3-point defense in SEC action. In its 13 prior league games, SEC teams were making 40% of their tries from deep against the Tigers.
For the game, Kentucky went a frigid 6 for 23 (26.1%) from behind the 3-point line.
According to ESPN, Saturday night’s game marked the 83rd consecutive sold-out game at Neville Arena, which opened as the home of the Tigers in 2010.
UK began the weekend as an expected 6 seed in the NCAA Tournament, according to the aggregate projections at BracketMatrix.com.
The Cats once again had only nine scholarship players healthy for Saturday’s game. The Wildcats were without each of junior guard Jaland Lowe, sophomore forward Jayden Quaintance and sophomore wing Kam Williams for an eighth straight contest.
Aberdeen was listed as “probable” on Kentucky’s initial availability report for the game, which was released Friday night. SEC guidelines define “probable” as a 75% chance that a player will play. Aberdeen wasn’t listed on UK’s day-of-game availability report, and he started the game for the Cats like usual. Pope said afterward that he had been battling an illness and was unable to practice the previous two days.
Auburn, now 15-12 overall and 6-8 in league play, entered Saturday’s game having lost five straight contests, with the bulk of those defeats coming against some of the SEC’s top teams. The losing streak, which dated back to Jan. 31, included losses to Tennessee, Alabama, Vanderbilt, Arkansas and Mississippi State.
Only four games remain in the regular season for Kentucky. Next up is another road tilt Tuesday night at South Carolina. That one will be a 7 p.m. ET start in Columbia.
South Carolina is 12-15 overall and 3-11 in SEC games, but the Gamecocks will be coming off a win. On Saturday afternoon, the Gamecocks beat Mississippi State at home 97-89.
The matchup between Kentucky and South Carolina projects as the most likely win left on UK’s regular-season slate.
Final stats: Auburn 75, Kentucky 74
This story was originally published February 21, 2026 at 11:01 PM.
