Basketball-wise, the Kentucky Wildcats didn’t have much to feel cheerful about over their holiday break.
\Mark Pope’s team was on the wrong end of a Madison Square Garden mauling four days before Christmas, an 85-65 loss to unranked Ohio State that was stunning in its sheer one-sidedness. The Cats took a few days away from basketball, as previously planned, to be with their families and celebrate the holidays. When they reconvened in Lexington after that short time off, Pope put them to work.
“I think there was probably some point during the last week where all of our guys were struggling to remember if there was anything involved in the game of basketball except for ball-screen defense,” Pope said after Kentucky defeated Brown 88-54 in Rupp Arena on Tuesday afternoon. “We repped and repped and repped and repped and repped. And to our guys’ credit, they really worked on it.”
The work showed against the Bears.
Kentucky forced 23 turnovers against its Ivy League opponents. That’s the most by a UK foe since Texas A&M had 25 turnovers in a 100-58 victory for the Wildcats in Rupp Arena on Jan. 3, 2017, back when Bam Adebayo, De’Aaron Fox and Malik Monk were wearing the blue and white.
On this New Year’s Eve nearly eight years later, it was UK’s defensive big three of Lamont Butler, Otega Oweh and Amari Williams doing much of the denying.
Mark Pope issued a holiday challenge to his UK basketball team. The Cats met it Tuesday from the beginning, their in-your-face defense preventing the Bears from ever getting into any kind of offensive rhythm.
“I think it starts at the point of attack,” Martin said. “I mean, Butler and Oweh are terrific defensive guards. … I think their pressure at the point of their defense — and then, obviously, Williams at the back end — I think made it hard on us. They were trying to take us out of running our pindown action, our zoom action. They denied a lot of handoffs. We got a couple back cuts early, but it wasn’t enough to loosen them up.
“So I think it starts with those three guys, but I think their entire team — and then their scheme defensively — deserves a lot of credit.”
The Cats came out looking like a team that had worked on nothing but defense all week.
The first few minutes of the game were shaky from a scoring perspective, no doubt unsettling for an early-arriving Rupp crowd filled to capacity, ready to cheer on the Cats a week and a half after watching them falter in New York, only to see more of the same at the start against Brown.
Kentucky committed turnovers on three of its first four possessions. The Cats had just one basket in the first five minutes of the game. They trailed the Bears at that point, 10 days after a dreadful 17-for-57 shooting performance in the loss to Ohio State.
Things turned around quickly from there, Andrew Carr scoring seven straight UK points early in a 15-3 run that laid the foundation for a 34-point rout.
After those three early miscues, Kentucky had just two the rest of the game, the total of five a season low for the Cats, who outscored Brown 33-4 in points off turnovers. UK was 30-for-60 from the field — and 19-for-34 in the second half — with Carr leading the way with 14 points, all of them before halftime, and Oweh, Williams and Koby Brea scoring 13 apiece.
But defense was the story of this one, just as Pope would have hoped.
“I mean, that’s what we’ve been doing all week,” Williams said. “We’ve had segments where it was just 45 minutes of us working the ball-screen defense. So, just coming out and being able to do that against a different team is fun. And something we’re going to build on for the rest of the games coming up.”