Here’s what John Calipari said after UK’s 78-66 win at Vanderbilt on Tuesday: “We’ve got some hard games coming up. Hard games.”
Granted, Kentucky’s basketball coach will try to convince you an upcoming game against a middle school team that lost to its last opponent by double digits — “They had them beat,” Cal would insist — was going to be a difficult game.
This time, believe the man.
Tennessee comes to Rupp Arena on Saturday. The Vols are 22nd in the latest AP Top 25. Next Wednesday, Kentucky travels to College Station to play Texas A&M, off to a surprising 3-0 SEC start. The Aggies are 10-0 at home. On Saturday the 22nd, the Cats visits Auburn to play the fourth-ranked Tigers, who improved to 15-1 with an 81-77 win at No. 24 Alabama on Tuesday night.
Our friend Gary Parrish over at CBS Sports has Auburn No. 1 in his daily rankings. “The resume is strong — so strong that the Tigers should also move to No. 1 in the Associated Press Top 25 poll on Monday for the first time in school history if enough AP voters know what they’re doing.”
So yes, Kentucky’s next three games will be difficult. They will also be revealing, a three-game stretch that will tell us just where the Wildcats are at this point, and what needs to happen for them to get to where they ultimately want to go.
So far, so good. UK is 13-3 overall, 3-1 in the SEC. You know the bumps in the road. Lost to Duke on a neutral floor in the season opener. Lost at Notre Dame in its first true road game. Lost at now No. 12 LSU when point guard Sahvir Wheeler suffered a neck injury in the first four minutes. Old news.
As a body of work, the Cats were No. 12 in the NCAA NET rankings after Tuesday’s action. They are 1-2 in so-called Quad 1 games, 2-1 vs. Quad 2, 1-0 vs. Quad 3. Glossary: A Quad 1 win is a home win versus teams ranked 1-30, a neutral court win vs 1-50 and a road win vs 1-75. North Carolina (35th in the NET) is UK’s lone Quad 1 win. Duke (15th) and LSU (3rd) are its two Quad 1 losses.
Kentucky’s next three games are all Quad 1 opportunities. Tennessee is No. 10 in the NET. Texas A&M is No. 55. Auburn is No. 6. With Alabama at 23, Mississippi State at 46 and Florida at 49, the SEC has seven teams ranked in the NET’s top 50. Move over Kirby Smart and Nick Saban. The SEC may be the best basketball league in the nation this year, too.
Are the Cats up to the task? Calipari has the tools. One giant one. Oscar Tshiebwe is both delightful and destructive. He combined a career-high 30 points with 13 rebounds at Vanderbilt. Besides his ravenous rebounding — the nation’s best at 15.1 per game — the 6-foot-9 center keeps sharpening his post skills. He demands national Player of the Year attention.
Tennessee isn’t Vanderbilt. Ken Pomeroy’s numbers rank the Vols as the second-best defensive team in the nation, just behind LSU. Where Vandy Coach Jerry Stackhouse rarely doubled Tshiebwe on Tuesday, Rick Barnes has 6-9 John Fulkerson, 6-8 Olivier Nkamhoua and 7-foot Uros Plavsic to run at the Kentucky center.
Barnes knows what he’s doing. Since his 2015 arrival in Knoxville, he is 8-6 against his good friend Calipari. He has won two straight and three of his last four at Rupp. Only once in those eight losses did Kentucky shoot better than 44.6 percent. The numbers say that at 49.6 percent, this is Calipari’s best shooting team at UK. Meanwhile, Tennessee’s opponents are shooting just 39.7 percent from the floor.
Wheeler’s uncertain return date is a wild card. Tennessee boasts a talented freshman guard in Kennedy Chandler. On-the-ball pressure by Wheeler would help the Cats’ case.
Starting Saturday, Kentucky’s next three games offer just a snapshot, true, but a fun one. We’ll see what develops.
