Emotional resilience separates Kentucky: "You're not going to be able to breathe for 40 straight minutes."

Kentucky had several opportunities to let go of the rope against Duke, moments where the talent gap or length or athleticism felt like too much to overcome. The Wildcats were uncomfortable, no doubt. We all felt it, both in the first half down ten and the second down nine. As the momentum appeared to be on the cusp of slipping away for good, Mark Pope’s group would respond with a big-time bucket or defensive stop to keep hope alive.

It was like a heavyweight boxing match with the favorite throwing blow after blow after blow expecting the knockout punch to come at any point. Instead, the underdog dodged haymakers and responded with body shots to chip away, waiting for that window to pounce once fatigue crept in.

Then Kentucky turned a nine-point deficit with 13:37 to go into a five-point win at the final horn. Rocky takes down Drago.

Pope was asked about the adjustments his team made, specifically when shots weren’t falling at a blistering rate and they still found ways to pull off the comeback victory. How did they do it? Emotional resilience. When the outlook is dire, you don’t abort mission on your identity. You trust the practice reps and the hours of work you put in to perfect your craft, knowing the payoff will come eventually.

“Listen, we’re gonna shoot the ball whether we make them or miss them. I mean, it’s just an integral part of our of the way we play,” the Kentucky head coach said. “We’re gonna really focus on the offensive glass, you know? And offensive glass is a great example. Great offensive rebounders is a little bit talent and length and athleticism and skill and mostly persistence, right? Because if you go to the offensive glass ten times, you’re probably — if you’re an OK player, you’re gonna come up with one offensive rebound. That’s it. That means nine times you went to the offensive glass with your whole heart and were rejected.

“We don’t like rejection. We don’t like when people — I know people do hearts, is there like a thumbs down sign that they do on social media? Is there a rejection sign? We don’t like being rejected, we don’t like coming up short. We don’t like it when we’re not successful at something, we kind of want to walk away and do something different, right? And that’s what I was talking about postgame in our last game about emotional resilience. It’s this ability, like, ‘Man, I’ve gone to the glass seven times, I’m getting elbowed in the face every single time. On time number eight, am I going to go to the glass as hard as I can? Can I go time number nine with no fruit for my labor? I’ve gone nine times and come up empty, so why am I going to waste the energy going the tenth time?’ And the tenth time is when you have the breakthrough, right?”

That’s a championship mindset, to put it simply. You don’t back away from your habits when the going gets tough. You dig in and persevere.

“Don’t turn back. That’s emotional resilience,” Pope added. “Like that’s what champs do, that’s how they are. They get hit and hit and hit again. They come up short, come up short, come up short, come up short, but they refuse to stop coming. It’s the whole idea of us coming in waves, right? It’s just this relentless persistence.

“That’s probably more important to me than guys deciding to take shots or not take shots depending if they’re making them or not. We’re going to be who we are.”

Unfortunately for Kentucky’s competition this year, that’s going to be what this team is. The Wildcats may not go undefeated, obviously, but you won’t ever catch this group wavering when pressure strikes. Pope saw that emotional resilience he demands on the big stage against Duke.

They kept coming in waves until the dam broke in their favor.

“There’s so much that we can do better, but I was unbelievably impressed with our thrust,” he said. “So for us, thrust is from the time the ball gets in our hands, the defensive to offensive transition. It’s the time the ball gets in our hands, whether it’s a make or a miss, and then getting it down the court. Our thrust all night long was elite. There was a ton of offensive frustration, there’s defensive frustration, there’s all of the frustration in the game. We didn’t let any of that frustration in this game carry over to our thrust.

“It was great whether the other team scored, whether the other team turned it over, whether we got a rebound, whether it was a loose ball, right? And that starts with emotional resilience, and that’s how we play.”

If you don’t bring it from the opening tip to the final buzzer, this group will pick you apart until it finds a way to beat you. That’s just the reality.

“We’ll do some things schematically, we’ll make some changes that are really, really important to us and you can kind of manipulate the game in some ways, but our base level is — listen, if you come play Kentucky, then you’re going to play for 40 minutes and we’re not going away,” Pope added. “We’re not backing down and we’re not changing. We’re going to keep coming and coming and coming.

“That doesn’t mean that that we’re going to win every game, it means that you’re going to have your hands full and you’re not going to be able to breathe for 40 straight minutes without a second. That’s our goal. That’s the team we aspire to be, and that’s what we’re working on.”