Here’s a three-step plan to save the Kentucky basketball season
John Calipari thought Kentucky would defeat North Carolina. He said so after the game.
Of vastly less consequence, I thought Kentucky would defeat North Carolina.
For roughly 27 minutes of game action Saturday between the Wildcats and Tar Heels in the seventh annual CBS Sports Classic, it looked like struggling UK was going to defeat No. 22 UNC.
When Davion Mintz scored on a layup with 13:15 left in the game, the Cats led 48-42. There was a lot of basketball left, but a potentially season-altering victory seemed within grasp.
Instead, “we let the go of the rope,” Calipari said. “So disappointed, so disappointed about the last 10 minutes of that game.”
In what has become a familiar litany of woe for the 2020-21 Kentucky Wildcats, ill-timed turnovers, bad shooting, defensive lapses and maybe even some lack of fight combined to doom UK.
From 48-42 down, North Carolina (5-2) ended the game with a 33-15 outburst and handed Kentucky a 75-63 defeat at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in Cleveland.
“Our intensity as far as fighting and attention to detail kind of waned,” said injured UK forward Keion Brooks of the Wildcats’ late-game collapse.
Though sidelined by a leg injury and yet to play this season, Brooks was the Kentucky player who volunteered to meet the media via video conference after the latest Cats loss. “We just continue to make too many mental errors,” Brooks observed.
Now, a Kentucky team has started a men’s college hoops season 1-5 for the first time since Coach Basil Hayden’s 1926-27 Cats began 1-8 en route to a 3-13 season.
Calvin Coolidge was the president the last time a UK men’s hoops team stood at 1-5.
The good news for the current Cats is that there is still ample time to salvage what has so far been a dispiriting slog of a season.
UK still has its annual intrastate Armageddon with No. 23 Louisville (Dec. 26 in the KFC Yum Center); an SEC-Big 12 Challenge meeting with No. 11 Texas (in Rupp Arena) and its full SEC schedule remaining.
Whether Kentucky has the capacity to right a listing ship remains very much in question. So in service to a Big Blue Nation now in crisis mode, here is a three-step plan to save the Cats’ season.
1.) Small ball is the way to go. Along with a first-half spurt of effective play from freshman forward Lance Ware, the brightest spots for UK in the loss to UNC were much-criticized point guards Davion Mintz and Devin Askew.
Mintz, the graduate transfer from Creighton, had team highs with 17 points and eight rebounds.
Askew, the reclassified true freshman, had his best collegiate game to date, scoring 12 points with four rebounds and a team-best three assists.
Advanced metrics have suggested that Kentucky plays best when both Mintz and Askew are on the floor.
Those two with wings Terrence Clarke and Brandon Boston and then having senior transfer Olivier Sarr and freshman shot-blocker Isaiah Jackson share the post would maximize UK’s ballhandling capacity and spread the court in a way that could open up driving lanes.
If you come up against an opponent that you can’t go small against, you can always go back to having two bigs on the court.
2.) Asking Terrence Clarke to play point is asking too much. In the first game after Calipari said UK would “play through” the 6-7 Clarke, the Boston native fouled out after having made three of 11 shots with three turnovers and no assists.
Even if you think Clarke is the best option UK has to create off the dribble, he is not a natural point and asking him to try risks curtailing one of your potentially most creative scorers.
For a team that does not appear to have one surefire point guard, one of the benefits of a “small ball” approach would be you could spread those responsibilities among multiple perimeter players and, in doing so, maybe turn a weakness into a strength.
3.) Pray for Keion Brooks’ health. Look, the 6-7, 205-pound sophomore averaged 4.5 points and 3.2 rebounds last season for UK. So it is not as if the Fort Wayne, Ind., product has a glowing college hoops résumé.
Still, Brooks is talented. And whenever he returns, he will give Kentucky something it does not otherwise have — a contributing player with prior experience playing for Calipari at UK.
“It’s killing me,” Brooks said, “not to be on the court, out there with my team.”
As poorly as this season has started, remember: Kentucky basketball history is filled with seasons in which teams battled through early adversity — think 1974-75; 2002-03; 2013-14, to name three — and turned gloom into boom.
Whether a team that has looked as bad as the 2020-21 Wildcats so far have can make a similar U-turn is still to be determined, of course.
One thing does seem certain: From 1-5, there is nowhere to go but up.
This story was originally published December 19, 2020 at 6:47 PM.
