Three takeaways from Kentucky basketball’s win over Alabama
Three takeaways from Kentucky basketball’s 76-67 win over Alabama at Rupp Arena on Saturday:
1. Immanuel Quickley is quickly becoming a star
Kentucky was clinging to a 71-67 lead. There was 1:01 left. John Calipari called timeout. He knew what play he wanted to run. He knew who he wanted to shoot the basketball. He called timeout anyway. “I iced my own guy,” he said.
It didn’t matter. Sophomore guard Immanuel Quickley inbounded the ball on the baseline to Nick Richards, then came off a Richards screen to take a handoff. It’s the oldest play in the playbook. That didn’t matter anyway. There was a wide-open Quickley out of the right corner. And these days an open Quickley means the ball is going through the net.
“We should have switched on that play,” Alabama Coach Nate Oats said later. “But give them credit.”
That was the fifth three-pointer Quickley made on an afternoon when he attempted six triples and finished with 19 points as the Wildcats’ ran their record to 12-3 overall and 3-0 in the SEC by holding off the Tide.
Not that we should have been surprised. Quickley scored 15 points in UK’s road win at Georgia on Tuesday, 23 in the Cats’ home victory over Missouri last Saturday and 18 in Kentucky’s 78-70 overtime win over visiting Louisville on Dec. 28.
During that stretch, Quickley has made 14 of 23 three-pointers, including 12 of 17 over the last three games. Though he’s not in the starting lineup, Quickley has been on the floor when it matters, at the end of games.
“It feels like high school right now,” he said afterward. “It just feels like it’s going in.”
“With him shooting like that, they’re a completely different team,” Oats said.
2. Alabama’s coach credited Kentucky’s defense
Under Oats, the former Buffalo head coach in his first year in Tuscaloosa, the Crimson Tide has been one of the nation’s highest-scoring teams, raking fourth at 84.4 points per game. The Tide ranked third in adjusted tempo, according to analytics expert Ken Pomeroy. And as Calipari said, Oats’ teams run not to drive it to the rim, but to kick it to open three-point shooters.
Saturday, however, Alabama was just four of 21 from three-point range. That included a 1-for-8 showing in the second half. The four triples was a season-low.
“They’re hard to score on,” said Oats afterward, crediting not just Kentucky’s ability to pressure the outside shot, but also the way Nick Richards (four blocked shots) protected the rim.
“They did as good job defensively as anyone has done on us all year,” Oats said. “They make it tough to score on the points. You try to tell your guys what it’s going to be like to try and score at the rim on these guys, maybe you should take a few more spray-out threes, but until you get in the game, I don’t know how you emulate it.”
Alabama ended up shooting 36.8 percent for the game, including 31.8 percent the first half. John Petty, its leading scorer on the season, was just six of 15 from the floor. Herbert Jones made eight of 20 shots. James “Beetle” Bolden, the former Covington Holmes star who is a grad transfer from West Virginia, missed nine of his 11 shots.
3. Now it’s back on the road again
It’s a full week on the road this time for Calipari’s Cats. They travel to South Carolina on Wednesday night to face the Gamecocks in a 6:30 p.m. start. After a short return home, it’s off to Fayetteville where Kentucky plays Arkansas on Saturday.
South Carolina dropped a tough one at Tennessee on Saturday, losing 56-55 in Knoxville. Frank Martin’s team is now 8-7 overall and 0-2 in the SEC. But Columbia has proved a quirky place to play for Calipari’s teams, including a place where Cal has been tossed out of the game a couple of times.
Arkansas has been one of the league’s pleasant surprises. Under first-year coach Eric Musselman, the Razorbacks were 12-2 overall and 1-1 in the league heading into Saturday night’s game at Ole Miss. That one SEC loss was a two-point decision, 79-77, at LSU on Wednesday.
In its first true road game of the season, Kentucky came on strong in the second half to beat Georgia in Athens on Tuesday. But Georgia got blitzed by undefeated Auburn 82-60 on Saturday at Auburn. The Tigers are now 15-0 overall and 3-0 in the SEC.
This story was originally published January 11, 2020 at 4:09 PM.
