Duke hangover? Mark Pope doesn't believe in trap games

Were you concerned about Kentucky losing focus against inferior competition after pulling off an emotional win over Duke in the Champions Classic? You’re not alone. It’s an older group with seven fifth-year seniors, so maybe they’d be mature enough to not let their guard down? Those extreme highs and lows are normal for freshman-led teams, but what’s the response when you have the most experience the program has ever seen?

Interestingly enough, Mark Pope doesn’t believe in those narratives at all — and it has nothing to do with this team’s maturity or lack thereof. If you prepare the exact same way every single game, no matter the competition, you always know what to expect from your group. Shots won’t fall the same way every game and the game plans will change, as will the adjustments, but the emotions should stay level for the most part.

Trap games? Yeah, they don’t actually exist.

“You know, it’s interesting. We had this conversation earlier today with the broadcast team,” Pope said following Kentucky’s 97-68 win over Lipscomb. “We don’t stress. Like, we don’t get nervous, we don’t worry because it doesn’t actually work. Sometimes we think if a team has a letdown after a big win, it’s like, oh man, if the coach had just thought about the possibility of it being a letdown and prepared this team for no letdown, it wouldn’t have happened. 

“What happens is we all just overkill, right? We just start pushing that narrative so hard with our team. We don’t actually do it at all.  We are always going to be focused on what we need to do.”

Distractions are always present, which is why Pope talked about finding moments to be still and live in the now to open the season. No looking ahead or behind, the next game instead always being “the biggest game we’ve ever played.”

You only get 31 regular season games each year with as many as 40 if things go perfectly. Why waste any opportunity getting caught up in the noise?

“We really work hard. It’s human nature to worry about that a little bit, but we really work hard to focus on what we are trying to do,” he continued. “Our guys are really hungry to get better, we are hungry to become a great team. We don’t have a lot of time to do it, so the last game was over and it was kind of onto, like, how can we get better? How can we get better? That’s the only thing we talk about.”

It’s a psychological thing, the mindset of a ‘trap game’ coming from doubt rather than confidence. If you worry about a scrappy team coming in hungry to take the first punch, odds are you’re going to take it rather than throwing one of your own.

Instead, Pope stuck to the script of learning the ins and outs of the competition, coming up with a game plan and executing. That’s exactly how things unfolded inside Rupp Arena on Tuesday.

“The biology of that, the neuroscience of that is 100% in support of that. Right?” Pope said. “You know, we are not going to focus on what we don’t want to have happen, we are going to focus on what we do want to have happen. Our guys have received that really well. We did not spend much time on that at all, and we won’t. That’s not the way we do it. 

“That doesn’t mean we won’t ever have bad results, it just means that we are going to always focus on what we are trying to do and we are going to try to be laser focused on that. We are not going to spend a lot of time thinking about what we do not want to have happen.”