John Calipari challenges his team ahead of start of SEC schedule

Kentucky suffered a disappointing loss on Saturday, falling 63-53 to UCLA in their lowest-scoring outing of the season. The Wildcats have one more non-conference game at home against Florida A&M on Wednesday before they start their SEC schedule, and head coach John Calipari shared what needs to happen when they enter conference play.

“You have to get mentally and physically tougher, you have to. You’re going to be in wars every game and for us, it’s figuring out alright how are we doing this, which group, who is it?” Calipari asked. “I didn’t put Daimion (Collins) in this game, but you’re looking at it saying okay, maybe he’s another guy we try.”

The Wildcats definitely have some things to figure out before heading into SEC play, as they struggled heavily in the scoring and turnover department against the Bruins on Saturday.

“But I haven’t lost any faith in the team, I’m disappointed and right now even without watching the tape I’m disappointed. And seeing the numbers, 18 turnovers and do you understand we got 21 offensive rebounds against a good rebounding team. That means you get the ball like a foot from the basket and we didn’t get balls in, so there’s a lot of things that I would say like we’re better than this, but we’re gonna have to show it,” Calipari said.

Calipari anticipated that their game versus UCLA would be a battle and a bloodbath, so he attempted to make practice harder on the team heading into the game. And they may have not gotten the result they wanted on the scoreboard, but the toughness being built will hopefully carry into the rest of their games this season.

“I was kind of mean for two days in practice, really hard and I was really honest with them because I knew if I didn’t, like we fought and we had a chance to win, you gotta understand we missed every shot, every free throw, 18 turnovers, and had a chance to win,” Calipari said.

Shot making is an area that the Wildcats can improve upon going forward, but hopefully for them, they can combine that with the physical and mental toughness Calipari is attempting to instill heading into their toughest stretch of games of the season.

“Because we fought with the guys I put in, we fought, but the way we played that’s a game you’re trying to score 75. But you’re gonna have to make some shots, make a floater, I’ll tell you what they made a bunch of floaters, we missed every one, I don’t think we made one, something we work on too,” Calipari said. “But we’ll get better folks, we will get better.”