It may be January, but it feels like clock is ticking on the UK basketball season
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Coach Pope tightened rotation, started Lowe and Quaintance, yet Kentucky collapsed.
- Up 66-58 with 4:37 left, Kentucky managed one field goal and yielded a 15-2 run.
- Roster lacks 3-point shooting and ball-handling bigs, leaving execution wanting.
For Kentucky men’s basketball’s 2025-26 SEC home opener with Missouri, Mark Pope did something one rarely sees from a coach.
The UK head man essentially gave Wildcats fans everything they have been calling for.
Pope changed his starting lineup.
He tightened the Kentucky rotation.
UK’s “best players” got more run — including designated 3-point shooter Kam Williams playing extended minutes.
Yet instead of a season-turning victory, what we might call Pope’s “Please the Fans Night” yielded one of the more agonizing UK defeats in recent memory.
Up 66-58 with 4:37 left in the game on an Otega Oweh 3-pointer, Kentucky would score only one more field goal the rest of the way.
The turnover-prone Wildcats were outscored 15-2 by Missouri down the stretch and took a 73-68 loss to Dennis Gates’ Tigers before a Rupp Arena crowd of 19,085 — some of whom were booing after the final horn sounded.
“Our execution down the stretch was poor,” Pope said afterward.
“Worse than poor” would be more accurate.
We’re barely into January, and Kentucky sits 9-6 overall, 0-2 in the SEC and 2-6 in games against quality opponents.
If you are any kind of student of UK men’s hoops history, you can recite seasons (1972-73; 2010-11; 2013-14, to name three) in which the Wildcats started slow and yet turned it around sufficiently to make some magic in March.
There’s certainly time for the 2025-26 Wildcats to traverse the same path. Yet as the negativity around the Kentucky program mounts, it feels like the clock is already ticking on saving this season.
What made the outcome vs. Missouri (12-3, 2-0 SEC) so dispiriting is that Pope made what seemed the logical changes.
Kentucky started point guard Jaland Lowe and big man Jayden Quaintance, generally considered, along with Oweh, to be among UK’s three most-talented players.
Yet even with the back-from-injuries duo of Lowe and Quaintance on the court together at the start, UK still fell behind early, 19-12, and trailed 33-32 at the half.
Lowe, who shot 2 of 11, did not play as well as a starter as he had been doing coming off the bench.
Quaintance scored one point as he continues to look rusty in his fourth game back after tearing an ACL last season at Arizona State.
As many had been pleading for Pope to do, the Kentucky coach tightened his rotation.
Pope only played nine players and one of them, guard Collin Chandler, logged only five minutes.
That meant more minutes for UK’s “top players.”
Oweh was on the floor for 35 minutes. Lowe, Williams and Denzel Aberdeen each played 28 minutes and power forward Mouhamed Dioubate was on the court for 25 minutes.
Two games back, Williams hit eight treys in UK’s 99-85 win over Bellarmine. So it frustrated some that he got only 16 minutes of court time in Kentucky’s next game, the 89-74 loss at Alabama last Saturday.
Given those 28 minutes Wednesday night, Williams got up seven 3-pointers. He made two, but missed two open ones in the final six minutes that, as it turned out, Kentucky really needed.
Meanwhile, instead of UK reaping the benefit of having its “best players” on the court longer, the Wildcats appeared to run out of gas late, outscored 8-0 in the final 1:14 of the game.
From the point Kentucky took that 66-58 lead, the Wildcats had nine more offensive possessions. They yielded: three turnovers, three missed 3-pointers, a shot in the lane that Missouri blocked, a missed layup and a solitary made jumper, by Brandon Garrison, with 2:17 left.
Pope, whose coaching brand has been modern offense, seems dumbfounded that one of his teams can be this challenged on offense.
“Our pace in the half court has been like the manifestation, the DNA of who we are on my teams,” Pope said. “It is incredibly frustrating that we are not finding that right now. That is why we are trying to simplify everything and dumb it down. Dumb it down so it’s incredibly simple so we can just at least execute with some pace and some decision-making. But we are not there yet, clearly.”
It is my promise to you that I will not write about Kentucky’s roster construction after every loss over the rest of the year.
But Pope’s five-out attack requires slick ball-handling big men.
All three of Kentucky’s late-game turnovers Wednesday night were by centers trying to make passes.
You expect a Pope offense to have accurate 3-point shooters spread around the court.
Five of the nine players UK used vs. Missouri are shooting less than 25% from beyond the arc.
The Kentucky execution is bad because the roster lacks sufficient offensive skill to play the way a Pope-led team needs to play.
So on a night when Pope gave Kentucky fans what many had been craving, UK nevertheless ended up in the same frustrating space.
It is still relatively early in this Wildcats’ basketball season, but you can hear the clock ticking.
