Kentucky did something at South Carolina that it cannot afford to do again
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Kentucky beat South Carolina despite tying a season high with 15 turnovers.
- UK was 7-0 in SEC when <10 turnovers, 1-6 when 11+ turnovers.
- Upcoming games vs Vandy, Texas A&M and Florida will punish sloppy ball control.
Before Kentucky’s 72-63 victory at South Carolina on Tuesday night — a cover-your-eyes-this-is-ugly win that was closer than the final score would indicate — Mark Pope was talking about turnovers.
As in, his UK team can’t afford to make many of them.
As the Wildcats have struggled their way through this season — particularly the conference portion of it — a magic number has emerged in that column of the box score.
Before Tuesday night, Kentucky was 7-0 in league play when it committed fewer than 10 turnovers. The Cats were 1-6 against SEC opponents when coughing it up 11 or more times.
“It happens to be a marker for this team,” Pope said in his pregame radio segment. “And 11 is a really solid number. You have to be pretty proficient to hold it to 11 turnovers.”
That’s indicative of just how little margin for error this UK team has at this point in the season.
The Wildcats came to Columbia mired in a three-game losing streak — the first such skid of the Pope era — and those three defeats were filled with a few too many head-scratching moments.
There were 13 turnovers at Auburn on Saturday, 12 in the home loss to Georgia a week ago and 14 at Florida the previous weekend. The way these Wildcats play, that adds up to three losses.
“You know, a lot of our turnovers were not necessarily forced,” Pope said of the recent miscues. “It was getting sped up, getting out of character, getting a little back on our heels.”
Kentucky didn’t look any better Tuesday night. In this game, the Wildcats tied a season high with 15 turnovers, leaving Pope shaking his head on the visiting sideline on numerous occasions.
Lucky for him — and for the Cats — it happened against the lowest-rated team in the SEC.
South Carolina came into this game with a 3-13 league record and ranked below every other team in the conference in both the KenPom and Torvik ratings. The Gamecocks ranked 15th in the SEC in both total offense and 3-point shooting heading into the night.
And while they got off to a hot start — 4 for 6 from deep in the opening minutes and a lead that lasted a little longer than that — they ended with another clunker, shooting 36.8% from the field and scoring a measly 63 points.
Even their home-court advantage wasn’t worth anything by the time the ball was tipped. Colonial Life Arena was dead for much of the evening, the place less than half full, with seemingly as many Kentucky fans in the building as those cheering for South Carolina.
The product on the court matched the atmosphere, and Pope — though his team did just enough to snap its three-game skid — didn’t seem particularly happy after it was finished.
He knows his team probably can’t play like this again this season and come away with a win.
UK’s next three games will come at home against Vanderbilt (a team that beat the Cats by 25 points last month), on the road at Texas A&M (a team that started the week ahead of Kentucky in the SEC standings) and at home against Florida (the clear-cut favorite to win the league, and another team that has already defeated the Wildcats this season).
And then the SEC Tournament. And then the NCAA Tournament.
Depending on their draw for those two postseason events, this might be the last time all season that the Wildcats (18-10, 9-6 SEC) will go into a game as the favorites. And what they did against South Carolina simply won’t fly against the caliber of opponent that’s coming up next.
Pope didn’t shy away from the miscues.
“We made some sticky decisions,” he said. “... We were a little bit obtuse about trying to play in isolation, where there’s no gap space. Some of that was self-inflicted. Some moments of the game, there was a little weirdness. Some moments of the game, we were pressing a little bit. That happens. But it’s going to be important that we continue to get better at protecting the ball. That marker is important for us. It’s been almost perfect in its predictive value of the outcome of the game.”
Against most teams in the league — and just about anyone the Cats will see in March Madness — the sloppiness on display Tuesday night would likely lead to a defeat. But South Carolina has struggled on both ends of the floor all season, and the Gamecocks simply didn’t have enough firepower to get past Kentucky.
Coach Lamont Paris was pleased with his team’s defensive effort — holding UK to 39.4% shooting and limiting Otega Oweh to single digits in scoring for the first time all season — and he also saw a Kentucky team that wasn’t exactly deliberate with the ball.
“I think most of the decisions were made in a crowd,” Paris said of those 15 turnovers. “I thought our rotations were really good. I mean, we spent the last two days really, really doing that. And so there just weren’t as many open, clean scenarios for guys to make straightforward decisions.
“And, honestly, some of the straightforward decisions are the decisions that a guy is reluctant to make, because the straightforward decision is, ‘Get the ball out of my hands quickly.’ And, you know, I wouldn’t want to do that. Guys don’t want to do that. You’re a talented player, and now you have to get the ball out of your hands within a couple of seconds — just for the good of the greater good. I don’t think guys really want to do that normally.”
That’s an area where UK thrived in Pope’s first season, the ball flying from one player to another — seemingly hardly ever staying in one spot for more than a split second — before a wide-open shot presented itself. Pope’s been preaching a similar style this season, but he’s also acknowledged that this team isn’t built the same as the last one, and sometimes the result is the ugly type of ball that got played Tuesday night.
“There were a lot of guys around (the ball),” Paris said of his team’s defense. “Decisions had to be made in traffic, and we were willing to put our body in front of another body. It was effective.”
Oweh, who finished with eight points on 3-for-13 shooting, had three turnovers. Andrija Jelavic and Malachi Moreno each mathced that number. Freshman guard Jasper Johnson — like Jelavic and Moreno, in his first season of college basketball — committed three turnovers in just eight minutes on the court.
“It was a bunch of things,” Pope said after the game. “One, it was just us being a little bit rushed, a little bit anxious. That was the biggest one. Two, it was just being a little bit stubborn — one on three and one on five — not making the simple play and trusting the next guy. Three, there’s a little bit of youth out there that was problematic for us.”
Paris acknowledged that the game plan was to stop Oweh at all costs. That worked, and it trickled into enough areas that Kentucky never really seemed comfortable for most of the night.
The Wildcats did enough to win in the end.
Denzel Aberdeen was big, scoring 19 points — including a crucial trio of 3-pointers in the first half — while dishing out five assists with zero turnovers in nearly 37 minutes on the court. Mouhamed Dioubate made some key defensive plays and scored 12 points. Jelavic tied a career high with 11 points, finding seams on cuts for easy looks at the rim as South Carolina tried to limit Oweh and Aberdeen out on the perimeter. Collin Chandler hit a big 3-pointer down the stretch to make it a 64-57 game inside of two minutes, a dagger shot on an ugly night.
UK managed to outrebound South Carolina 48-28 — Moreno had 11, Brandon Garrison added seven off the bench, four others grabbed at least four boards — and 18 of those came on the offensive end. The Cats won second-chance points 14-4 as a result, a stat both coaches pointed to afterward as a key to Kentucky’s victory.
But this season won’t see many more UK wins if Pope’s team can’t take better care of the ball.
Vandy, Texas A&M and Florida have all been top-tier SEC teams this season. All three can make an opponent pay for its mistakes. The Aggies and Commodores rank second and third in the SEC, respectively, in forcing turnovers. And Pope knew exactly what was coming after this trip to South Carolina.
Asked in his postgame radio interview about the pressure of coming to Columbia on a three-game losing streak, Pope, who was fined $25,000 earlier in the day for comments he made about the referees following the loss at Auburn, acknowledged the obvious from the point of a UK basketball coach.
“There’s pressure if you’ve won three in a row,” he said. “The pressure is ever present, which is such a privilege. It’s why you want to come play in Kentucky. Nobody wants to go play where it doesn’t matter, right? But I do think there’s an emotional toll on our guys. A couple of (losses) and then the game Saturday — the way it finished — we spent more time trying to purge ourselves and refresh ourselves from the energy of the last 10 days than we did really on prep for (this) game, in terms of Xs and Os.
“And we did that with some success — with enough success — and we’ll work hard to get our juice up to a peak, peak, peak level for a massive game on Saturday in Rupp.”
On Tuesday night, the Wildcats simply needed a win. By any means necessary. They got one.
Now it’s about to get a whole lot more difficult.
This story was originally published February 24, 2026 at 11:28 PM.
