John Calipari addresses heightened defensive concerns ahead of March Madness

John Calipari had to address heightened defensive concerns after Kentucky dropped its SEC Tournament game to Texas A&M.

With March Madness around the corner, Calipari wanted to make sure everyone knew the Wildcats are capable of improvement even on a short turnaround. As far as the loss to A&M is concerned, the Aggies outplayed the Wildcats.

But there are no concerns for Calipari, but just simple things to work on.

“Yeah, we’ve been working on zone,” Calipari said. “We were good for a minute. You make a sub, one guy gives up two threes. Part of it, we hadn’t played it that much, but we were prepared to go to it if the guards kept getting downhill. But you got to have plan B in that thing. I think we do. Crazy thing was there were times we weren’t bad defensively. They just made, like, a tough shot.”

History shows that Kentucky can play better defense against higher level competition, so says Calipari.

“When I watch the tape, I’ll have a better idea,” Calipari said. “There were some times we had miscommunication. Get, not enough talking. A young team. They don’t talk enough. A guy can’t hear what they’re saying and gets clipped a little bit. We have shown that we can guard the best teams in the country. We have shown that you can score a hundred on us. We just got to lock in and know we’ve got to get better defensively.”

Calipari claimed that some lapse on offense contributed to the mishaps on the defensive end of things.

“When you’re not passing the ball to each other, and everybody’s not touching the ball, it bleeds into your defense, too,” Calipari said, “But they did this to us down there, too. We knew. They only out-rebounded us by a couple, but their turnovers, points off of turnovers, 18, ours was 4. But we shoot 50% from the two, 40% from the three-point line. Nine blocks. Pretty even. 21 assists. Just got to guard better. 87 points is enough to win most basketball games, unless they score 97.

“We’re going to have to lock in. Again, I keep coming back to offensively, whoever I put in, we seem to be okay. Some defensive players may have to step in there and let’s get it locked down. We just weren’t ourselves today. I want to give credit to A&M because they played well. They did good stuff today. They made more threes probably than they have in a while. Give them credit.”