Kentucky failed at the free throw line again

A lot went wrong in Kentucky Basketball‘s loss to UCLA in Madison Square Garden, the Wildcats’ third loss in four non-conference games against Power 5 teams. You can point to the slow start when the Bruins led by as many as 13 points before halftime or the continued poor shot selection or the 18 turnovers or going 0-for-11 from the field during a four-and-a-half-minute scoring drought to end the game after clawing back and cutting the lead to two. All of those things weighed heavily on the game’s outcome.

But right now let’s talk about the free-throw shooting because Kentucky’s 5-for-13 evening from the line may have done the most damage to the team’s chances. Oscar Tshiebwe was the worst of the bunch with four misses on his only four tries. That’s not a National Player of the Year performance.

After the game, John Calipari was asked about Lance Ware’s minutes with the first question of the press conference and he quickly redirected the conversation to his team’s free-throw woes.

“You can’t go 5-for-13 from the line, not in a game like this,” he said. “You can’t go four front end one-and-one, so, really, you’re 5-for-17. You don’t have to make every free throw, but you can’t go those numbers.”

Calipari then did that thing he does where he says something completely false and expects us to believe it, telling everyone in the room, “We’re not a bad free-throw shooting team. We were today.”

More than “today,” Kentucky is currently ranked 304th in the country at free-throw shooting, according to KenPom, with a 66.3 percentage through 10 games. Just last Saturday, Kentucky went 16-of-28 at the line at home against Yale, in addition to other poor shooting games we’d all like to forget from earlier in the season. Remember Michigan State?

Calipari added, “Mental toughness comes into play in all that. You’ve just got to be tough enough to know, I’m going to the line. I’m making these.”

OK. But how does it get better? Because it has to get better or outcomes like tonight will become more of the norm.