‘We know we need to clean it up.’ Kentucky women are rolling, but there’s room to grow.
The Kentucky women’s basketball team is off to a perfect start in Southeastern Conference play. At 4-0 after Sunday’s 80-61 win over Auburn in Memorial Coliseum, the Wildcats are unblemished in the standings.
However, in an SEC that includes seven of the nation’s top 19 teams — six of whom No. 12 Kentucky will have to play later this season — it’s the imperfections the Wildcats are racing to overcome.
Despite falling to the Wildcats by 19 points, a physical Auburn team exposed two potential areas of concern that could catch up with Kentucky (15-1 overall) against stronger teams later.
Injury-ridden and without star transfer Taliah Scott, Auburn (9-8, 0-4) was relentless in its approach, hungry for its first win in conference play and looking to snap a four-game losing streak. Though the Tigers may sit at the bottom of the league standings, they gave the Wildcats all they could handle. So much so, that All-America point guard Georgia Amoore, who recorded a team-high-tying 21 points and a game-high 11 assists against Auburn, shook her head in agreement afterward when head coach Kenny Brooks said this:
“I don’t think there is a more physical team than Auburn. I really don’t. And there may be some more talented teams, and obviously (Auburn head coach) Johnnie (Harris) has done a really good job handling her situation with a couple kids out. But the physicality part, they didn’t lose any of those kids.”
The Tigers’ physicality manifested itself in those two potential areas of concern for Kentucky: rebounding and foul trouble.
The Tigers, whose frontcourt height rivaled UK’s, outrebounded the Wildcats 38-32, including 17-5 on the offensive glass; Auburn averaged an SEC-low 34.7 rebounds per contest through its first 15 games, and not only surpassed its average against Kentucky, but held UK below its own average (41.3). The Wildcats’ rebounding average ranks ninth among SEC teams, and, though they’ve already secured wins over teams ranked sixth-through-eighth (Mississippi State, Vanderbilt, Florida), top-ranked foes Oklahoma (49.6), LSU (48.9), South Carolina (43.6), Tennessee (43.1) and Texas (42.1) still lie ahead.
“When we talked about it,” Brooks said. “And we know we need to clean it up, we need to rebound the ball a little bit better, I think it starts with staying out of foul trouble. Because when you get into foul trouble, then, you know, Clara Strack is sitting for most of the third quarter, and then Teonni (Key) had to sit some of the third quarter, you’re going to lose some of that prowess to go out and to rebound the basketball.
“But we also talked about, we haven’t rebounded the ball as well as we wanted to, but we still won by 19. You know, we won at Vanderbilt by 18 when we didn’t rebound the basketball as well as we wanted to. So we’re capable. We just really need to make sure, number one, they’re on the floor, and number two, it’s a mindset, you know? It’s a mindset with an understanding, ‘OK, this is the kind of game it’s going to be, and we got to go out and join that game.’”
Four of Kentucky’s five starters are among the SEC’s top eight in minutes played and all five average more than 28 minutes per game. That’s a product of injuries to projected rotation players and a bench made up largely of freshmen. Whether Kentucky can go the distance with Georgia Amoore (35.4 minutes per game), Amelia Hassett (32.3), Dazia Lawrence (31.8), Clara Strack (31.5) and Teonni Key (28.2) carrying so much of the load remains to be seen. But opponents know they can shift the advantage by removing Kentucky’s starters from the floor.
Harris said the way to deal with Kentucky’s length beneath the basket was to assert yourself inside.
“You just have to be aggressive,” Harris said. “I mean, we’re pretty athletic. ... We tried to get in up front and try to make it tough on the inside.
Strack finished the game with four fouls. Key and Hassett had three each.
How the Wildcats took command
All that said, Kentucky is 15-1 for a reason. The Wildcats have a unique ability to counteract their weaknesses by letting Amoore dictate the game’s pace and everyone sharing the ball.
“It was their guard play that really hurt us today,” Auburn’s Harris said.
Lawrence made four 3-pointers in matching Amoore’s 21 points, and the two combined to commit only five turnovers.
A team like Auburn, that, as Brooks said, tries to “muddy the game,” necessitates a consistent offense where the Wildcats are in control.
“First of all, my main duty is to control the tempo of the game and relieve a lot of the pressure,” Amoore said. “And I think just generally, watching the basketball in the SEC conference is the defense is tough, I mean, you don’t really know what looks you’re going to get, or what teams are going to throw at you. And I think we’ve talked about it, we’re unsure what those teams are ever going to do, just for me. So I think I’m doing a much better job personally than I have in years prior, of not getting sped up.”
The Wildcats led for more than 35 minutes, and shot 53.6% (30-of-56), including 33.3% (7-of-21) from beyond the arc while totaling 18 assists. Strack, Hassett and Key combined for six assists, which Amoore said provides an edge to their offensive attack.
“I know that we have a lot to build off of defensively,” Amoore said. “But offense, I think we controlled that. I don’t really think, you know, aside from them kind of getting up in the passing lanes and kind of pushing us out of our movement sets. We still had great scoring opportunities, and we got downhill and attacked. We had people like Teonni and Clara making great passes. So the team that has great bigs that can pass like that, it’s very hard to stop. And I think we’re getting used to sharing the ball so well, you look at us, and we have the one-more passes, and we’re just getting a lot more smarter with who’s free because the way that teams play us right now, one person is going to be pretty wide open.”
Strack contributed 16 points, five rebounds, two assists, four blocks and one steal. Key finished with 15 points, seven rebounds, one assist and two blocks.
Looking ahead
Kentucky is one of three league teams, joining South Carolina and undefeated LSU, still perfect in conference play.
The Wildcats will have Thursday off before back-to-back road trips, beginning with a battle against Georgia (9-9, 1-3 SEC) on Jan. 19. The Bulldogs lost 79-68 to Mississippi State on Sunday. Freshman guard Trinity Turner scored 23 points, and senior guard Asia Avinger scored 15 points.
Brooks, who typically takes a “one game at a time” approach, said he’s, first and foremost, concerned about the Wildcats’ bye week. When asked about the approaching road trip, he celebrated the fact that, even at away games, Big Blue Nation has shown up to support the program.
“We’ve shown that we can play well on the road,” Brooks said. “... And one of the things we’ve been really proud of is that we’ve had a great contingency of Big Blue Nation.
“We went to Florida, (the crowd) was about 50/50. And we went to Vanderbilt, and it was, I mean, it was a lot of people there. ... So they’re getting on board. We went to Purdue, a lot of people walking in with Kentucky jerseys on. So that helps a lot ... and hopefully we’ll continue to grow the fan base to where it can help us. But just making it business-like, making it business-like as we go on the road because we know everything is going to be tough on the road.”
Next game
No. 12 Kentucky at Georgia
When: 2 p.m. Sunday
TV: SEC Network+
Radio: WLAP-AM 630
Records: Kentucky 15-1 (4-0 SEC), Georgia 9-9 (1-3)
Series: Georgia leads 41-23
Last meeting: UK won 64-50 in Greenville, S.C., on March 6, 2024, in the first round of the SEC Tournament
