John Calipari proud of fight from Kentucky players vs. Kansas

Kentucky lost their fourth straight appearance in the Champion’s Classic on Tuesday in an 89-84 defeat to Kansas. However, John Calipari will take one small victory away from what his Wildcats showed against the top-ranked Jayhawks in Chicago.

Calipari expressed his admiration for his team’s fight to open his postgame press conference. Under circumstances where many thought that Kansas might run UK out of the gym, they scratched and clawed their way into a game that they put themselves in a position to win.

“What I was proud of was they fought. That’s a huge team and they had to fight to survive,” said Calipari. “We got down early and it looked like what everybody said would happen – we’re going to get smashed. Then, all of a sudden, we’re up.”

“I was proud of them,” Calipari said. “I mean Robert (Dillingham) went on a run, other guys that didn’t play well offensively rebounded and defended pretty good. Reed (Sheppard) was good, Jordan Burks was really good.”

Kansas overwhelmed Kentucky at the start with a 9-0 burst to open the game. From there, though, the Wildcats settled in and took as much as a 12-point lead in the first half before going into the break with a seven-point advantage.

UK then opened the second half with another strike of a 10-3 run to earn their largest lead of 14. Even so, that was the point where the Jayhawks came back to take control. They closed that gap and, in a tightly contest contest, their experience outmatched the Wildcat’s youth in the end, specifically with a 14-5 stretch after the final timeout, for the five-point victory.

Again, with five of their eight players in the game being freshmen and no true center to combat Hunter Dickinson, this is a game that Kentucky could have certainly lost by double-digits. Still, they found a way to be more than in it and in a spot to potentially take it.

Now, rather than accepting any more moral victories, Calipari knows his team has the chance to grow and be ready to secure an actual win by the time their next important game, especially one that gets into crunch time, comes around.

“The end of the game – missed some free throws, missed some shots, broke down a little bit,” said Calipari. “We’ve got to get better at finishing. But a young team learns that.”