Kyra Elzy ends her first season as UK head coach with some tough questions to ponder
Kentucky’s bid to return to the Sweet 16 of the women’s NCAA basketball tournament for the first time since 2016 was over Tuesday before it began.
UK watched Iowa, ignited by its splendid freshman star Caitlin Clark, run off 11 straight points to start the game.
Not even midway through the second quarter, the Wildcats trailed the Hawkeyes 34-13.
At halftime, it was 49-22 Iowa.
By that point, the fat lady was on her second encore.
Getting 35 points, seven rebounds and six assists from freshman wunderkind Clark, No. 5 seed Iowa (20-9) rocked No. 4 Kentucky 86-72 in the NCAA Tournament River Walk Region second round Tuesday at the Bill Greehey Arena in San Antonio, Texas.
The game was not as close as the score suggests. Down 84-59, Kentucky (18-9) ended the contest on a 13-2 run against (mostly) Iowa’s reserves.
“We dug ourselves in a hole and really never recovered from there,” a solemn Kentucky Coach Kyra Elzy said afterward via video-conference. “I thought early on, we had some good looks at the rim. The ball didn’t go in and I think we let our offense affect our defense.”
In the decisive first half, UK did a pretty fair imitation of the 1983-84 Kentucky men’s team and its infamous 3-of-33 shooting second half vs. Georgetown in the Final Four.
On Tuesday, the UK women shot a woeful 8-of-37 in half one.
At halftime, Kentucky as a team had 22 points; Iowa’s Clark had 24 points herself.
The 6-foot guard from West Des Moines went to the locker room at the intermission having made eight of 11 shots, six of eight treys.
“We made her take tough shots,” Kentucky star Rhyne Howard insisted afterward. “She was hitting. She was hot. She was making everything.”
So a season that began with UK Hoops backers dreaming of a breakthrough trip to the Final Four instead ended with a second-round thud.
In retrospect, expectations likely got out of hand for Kentucky.
When practice began last fall, Elzy had no idea she would be UK’s head coach. Matthew Mitchell’s abrupt departure in November thrust his assistant into a new role without chance to prepare.
On top of that, Elzy inherited a team that was integrating four new transfers and three freshmen in a season where a global pandemic disrupted the normal preseason routines.
Now, that Elzy will have some time to reflect, there are some tough questions that need answers:
1. At the end of the season, why was Kentucky starting games so slowly?
In its SEC tourney quarterfinals loss to Georgia, UK fell behind 15-2 and never recovered.
Even in beating undermanned Idaho State in Sunday’s NCAA Tournament first round, Kentucky got behind 18-8.
Then came Tuesday’s disastrous beginning against Iowa.
As a rule, allowing your opponents a furlong advantage before you start running is not a great strategy for winning races.
2. What is Kentucky’s defensive identity?
Early last decade, when Mitchell directed Kentucky to three trips to the Elite Eight in four seasons, UK thrived off of forced turnovers.
The three teams that reached the NCAA tourney region finals forced, on average, 22.9 (2009-10), 26.8 (2011-12) and 23.7 (2012-13) turnovers a game.
However, once the NCAA embraced its “freedom of movement” officiating initiative, Kentucky abandoned the full-court, run-and-jump press.
After Iowa turned it over 15 times Tuesday, UK ended the 2020-21 season having forced an average of 15.8 turnovers a game.
This season, that was not nearly enough to compensate for Kentucky’s inability to stay in front of drivers nor UK’s lack of rim protection.
Iowa shot 57.4 percent (35-of-61) overall.
UK couldn’t stop the Hawkeyes from the perimeter (Iowa was 10-of-19 on three-pointers) nor in the lane (Iowa scored 44 of its 86 points in the paint).
If it can’t return to pressing with abandon like it once did, Kentucky has to figure out a new way to create disruption defensively.
3. Why isn’t UK better at “playing off of” Rhyne Howard offensively?
Howard finished her junior season with 28 points, five rebounds, eight assists and six steals against Iowa. Twenty-one of those points came in the second half, 11 in the last 2:33 of the game.
Moving forward, what Elzy and her brain trust need to figure out is why, with a player who draws the defensive attention that does Howard, is Kentucky not able to get more consistent scoring from the other capable players on its roster.
Elzy spent a good bit of her first season pleading for more offensive balance.
Three years in, UK still needs to figure out how its other players can derive maximum benefit from the presence of Howard.
In Elzy’s first year, Kentucky did achieve some positives. UK’s five victories (5-6) over ranked teams were the most for the Cats since 2015-16. Kentucky’s No. 4 seed in the NCAA tourney was its best since 2017.
Still, the hope when the Wildcats began this season was that they had a chance to take the proverbial “next step.”
That did not happen.
Figuring out why will be the biggest of the tough questions Kyra Elzy faces this offseason.
