John Calipari wants Kentucky to play "deliberate" basketball

Over the past few weeks, John Calipari has been tinkering with lineups and running two-a-days to see what works with this Kentucky team. In today’s 86-63 win over Louisville, he thinks he found it. Instead of pushing the pace, Calipari wants his team to play more deliberately. In fact, he used the word “deliberate” eight times in his postgame press conference, a sign that a slower style of play may be here to stay.

“I’m mad at myself because we needed to be playing more deliberate,” Calipari said. “Playing faster and quicker and doing that, that’s all good, and you’re scoring 60. We played deliberate, which is what my teams have done historically. Still play fast and shoot threes. We didn’t shoot as many today but we scored a lot of points playing deliberate. And you could say, well, it’s Louisville. If my team plays this way, deliberate, like, we’re flying.”

For at least today, against one of the worst teams in college basketball, it worked. Kentucky scored 86 points, the fifth most of the season, and made a season-high 60% of its shots. As Cal said, the Cats didn’t attempt many threes, going 4-13 from the outside, the second-fewest attempts of the year behind the game vs. Yale. Kentucky dominated the paint, outscoring the Cards 46-34 and winning the battle of the boards 33-20. Oscar Tshiebwe finished with 24 points (10-13 FG, 4-9 FT) and 14 rebounds.

“We played good,” Oscar said. “Now, we get to slow the game down a little bit, like Coach said. We watched film and against Missouri, we were just rushing and everything. Now, we get to slow down. We run the plays, we make good shots.”

In fact, the more Oscar talked, the more it sounds like slowing things down was his idea.

“Against most of the teams we played, we just coast half-court and shoot the ball,” Oscar continued. “I said, ‘No, slow it down. Sometimes move the ball.’ And we’re going to be fine. Today, we moved the ball. We got easy buckets. We got dunks. It was easy.”

“If we catch the ball, we have a fastbreak, we run,” Oscar continued. “If we have nothing, we have to slow down. I watched the film against Missouri, it was just one pass and shoot the ball. We cannot do that. We’ve got to move the ball, move the ball, make the defense move. Get easy buckets.”

When asked if the more deliberate style of play helps his game, Oscar nodded enthusiastically.

“Yes, absolutely. We get the defense, we move the ball past each other. We make the game so easy.”

“The early grind of what we went through, maybe we needed to go through it, and we’ll see going forward,” Calipari said. “But that was something they had to feel, the grind, the deliberateness of how we played, passing the ball. You ready? Just to pass it. Well, I’ve got to pass it for someone to score. No, just pass it to pass it. And they did that today.”

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