New coach Pat Kelsey and Louisville basketball are currently short on chocolates

Give Louisville credit. It fought. It scrapped. Short on personnel and talent by comparison, the Cardinals jumped quickly out of the gate against No. 9-ranked Duke at the KFC Yum Center on Sunday night, held tough for 30 minutes, until finally, unsurprisingly, the roof caved in.

“Our goal was to wear on them because they’ve had a lot of injuries,” said Duke coach Jon Scheyer after the Blue Devils rallied from 14 points down to beat Louisville 76-65. “I thought down the stretch we were physically more ready just because of our depth.”

Tell Pat Kelsey about it. He is Louisville’s first-year coach. And after coming over from College of Charleston, Kelsey probably didn’t expect to be saddled with a short-handed roster for his Cardinals debut, one that lost two key players just in the past week.

The hyper-energetic Kasean Pryor was averaging 12 points and 6.1 rebounds per game before he tore his ACL in Louisville’s loss to Oklahoma after two impressive wins in the Battle 4 Atlantis. Pryor is out for the season. Koren Johnson averaged 11.1 points per game last season at Washington before transferring to U of L and suffering a shoulder injury that required surgery. Johnson is out for the season, as well.

“We’re not the same team that we were two, three weeks ago when we were playing 11 guys,” Kelsey said Sunday. “The difficult thing is practice. It’s hard to go the traditional five-on-five. I’m 49 and I can still hoop, so I have to jump in there sometimes.”

Last Tuesday, their first game without Pryor, the Cards were punked by Chris Beard and Ole Miss 86-63 at the Yum Center in the SEC/ACC Challenge. “We got our butts kicked,” Kelsey said.

Sunday was much a better showing. Duke was fresh off an 84-78 win over No. 2-ranked and visiting Auburn in that same SEC/ACC Challenge. The Blue Devils have Cooper Flagg. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. And the Devils are far from a one-man team.

“Duke is really, really good,” Kelsey said.

Louisville played really, really hard. The Cards made 8 of their 16 3-point shots in the first half on the way to a 30-16 lead at the 8:35 mark and a 37-33 advantage at the break. Turnovers were a problem — 10 in the first 20 minutes. And after going 5-of-18 from 3-point range in the first half, Duke started to see their shots drop in the second.

The visitors had chopped Louisville’s lead to 53-50 when Flagg picked up his fourth foul at the 10:36 mark. After U of L’s Terrence Edwards made a pair of free throws, the unfazed Blue Devils went on an 18-2 run that amounted to a separation Sunday.

You could almost see Louisville wearing down. Duke played 10 players; Louisville seven. U of L point guard Chucky Hepburn played 37 minutes. Shooting guard Reyne Smith was on the floor for 33. Edwards came off the bench to play 31 minutes and score 21 points.

Duke outscored the Cards 34-14 in the paint. And Louisville ended up with 15 turnovers, compared to seven for Duke. Say this for the Devils: They protect the basketball. Scheyer’s club committed just four turnovers in the win over Auburn.

UTEP comes to the Yum Center on Wednesday night, then the Cards, now 5-4, travel to Lexington for the annual battle with rival Kentucky. It says here the Cards will play hard on Saturday, but they’ll have a lot to overcome.

“Each season, like Forrest Gump said, it’s like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get,” Kelsey said. “We’ve been dealt a little bit of a tough hand with some injuries and things like that. We’re making some adjustments on the fly trying to figure out our new identity. (But) our guys played their butts off.”

This story was originally published December 9, 2024 at 6:00 AM.

John Clay

Lexington Herald-Leader

859-472-4218

John Clay is a sports columnist for the Lexington Herald-Leader. A native of Central Kentucky, he covered UK football from 1987 until being named sports columnist in 2000. He has covered 20 Final Fours and 42 consecutive Kentucky Derbys. Support my work with a digital subscription