BATON ROUGE, La. _ With less than three weeks left in the regular portion of this crazy college basketball season, it's difficult to know exactly where the Kentucky Wildcats fit into the national contender mix.
The Cats ranked 10th in the AP college basketball poll released Monday. They sit seventh in Jeff Sagarin's computer rankings. But they're just 22nd in the NCAA's NET rankings and 30th in Ken Pomeroy's overall efficiency rankings _ 31st on offense and 54th on defense.
They improved to 21-5 overall and 11-2 in the SEC with their 79-76 win at LSU on Tuesday night, one of the more impressive wins on the season. Why? LSU is a good team with a good coach, and the Tigers were playing before a packed Pete Maravich Assembly Center. And, after losing three of its last four games, LSU needed a win.
The home team didn't get it, thanks to Kentucky controlling the game from start to finish. Even in the first half, when LSU held a couple of brief leads and Kentucky couldn't make an open shot, going 2-for-10 from three-point range, you had the sense the Cats were the better team. Despite shooting just 31.6% from the floor, they led 29-28 at the break.
"I was skipping to the locker room at halftime," said Calipari, happy to have the lead.
Defense was the reason. LSU shot just 31.3% the first half. Then Calipari made a strategic alteration in the second half that Will Wade, the LSU coach, couldn't help but notice.
"(He) usually comes in and runs his pin-downs and all that stuff. We were hoping he was going to run all that because we can guard that," Wade said. "Then the second half he just said, 'To hell with that. We're just going to spread them and drive them and get the misses.' You know. He ran all his over-under stuff, put the high-ball screen out there and drove the hell of out of us to the front of the rim which was very, very smart.
"That's why he's in the Hall of Fame."
The same team that suffered through a 2-for-22 showing from three against Ole Miss made its first seven three-point attempts in the second half. It was 17-of-23 overall for a blistering 73.9% the final 20 minutes. Of the 10 buckets that were not threes, six came off drives to the rim.
Meanwhile, on the defensive end, Nick Richards recorded six of UK's 11 blocked shots. ("We haven't seen a rim protector as good as Nick Richards," said LSU's Skylar Mays afterward.) The Cats held the Tigers to just 39.4% shooting for the game. That's the seventh straight game in which the UK opponent has shot 40% or below.
So, with five games remaining in the regular season, what does Calipari think of his team?
"Got a will to win. That means you've got a chance," he said Tuesday. "I like that we've got a big guy at center. I like that we're playing three point guards. But when you're playing with a shortened rotation _ EJ, Keion, Nate and Johnny _ they've got to add to the game. They've got to come in and add. They can't ever take away. All you're doing is stepping in and adding to the game."
That would be EJ Montgomery, Keion Brooks, Nate Sestina and Johnny Juzang, the guys beyond UK's core four of Richards, Immanuel Quickley, Ashton Hagans and Tyrese Maxey. Sestina was the one who "added to the game" at LSU, scoring 11 points and grabbing eight rebounds.
"(They're probably) the key to where this thing goes," said Calipari of Montgomery, Brooks, Sestina and Juzang. "And they don't have to be crazy, out of their minds. But you've got to give us. You've got to add to what's going on."
In this college basketball season, that little extra might be more than enough to make a difference.
