Flashback Friday: The 1993 Cats vs. the Fab Five in the Final Four

Photo by David E. Kluho, Sports Illustrated/Getty Images

Tomorrow at Rupp Arena, the 1993 Kentucky team will celebrate the 25th anniversary of their Final Four run. For our younger readers, that’s the team that starred Jamal Mashburn and went to Kentucky’s first national semifinal since 1984, a feat even more impressive when you consider the program was only a few years removed from NCAA sanctions.

The 1993 Cats included Jamal Mashburn (NCAA Consensus First Team All-American and SEC Player of the Year), Travis Ford, Dale Brown, Jared Prickett, Roderick Rhodes, Tony Delk, and Walter McCarty. After winning the SEC Tournament and scoring 96 or more points in three of their NCAA Tournament games, Kentucky’s run ended in the semifinals vs. Michigan’s Fab Five. The game went to overtime, but with Mashburn and Prickett fouled out and Brown down with an injury, the Wolverines got the win and advanced to the national championship, where they lost to North Carolina.

Three years ago in a piece for The Players’ Tribune, Jalen Rose reflected on the Final Four game, which he called the Fab Five’s biggest win.

The Fab Five might have been the most talented team in college basketball, but any objective observer would admit the Wildcats weren’t far behind. That team had Tony Delk, Walter McCarty and Jamal Mashburn, all of whom would go on to be very good NBA players. And their biggest weapon might very well have been Rick Pitino, another Hall of Fame coach.

Their style of play, which involved a suffocating press defense and a run-and-gun offense with an emphasis on three-pointers, was quite similar to what we see among the great teams in the NBA today. It was innovative, and definitely not fun to play against. Up until they faced us, they were beating teams in the tournament by 30 points. Just dismantling them.

I encourage you to go read the rest of that article over at The Players’ Tribune. Or, you can relive some of the 1993 team’s best games below thanks to that magical thing we call YouTube.

https://youtu.be/8-pWoWP9xLQ

How awesome is that old CBS intro with James Brown?

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