Kentucky MBB focusing on long-term goals: "It's about the finish"

Looking around the rest of the college basketball landscape, Kentucky isn’t in a situation unique to its own. Fans would have obviously preferred a 6-0 or 5-1 start to the 2022-23 season instead of the 4-2 record that the ‘Cats currently stand on. But fellow Blue Bloods are in a similar position to begin the year.

Duke, North Carolina, Michigan State, and UCLA all join Kentucky in the two-loss category and check in near the back end of the Top 25. Even Gonzaga, which typically dominates regular-season action, is already up to two losses. Kansas just picked up its first loss to Tennessee by 14 points a few days ago. Everywhere you look, the country’s top programs are running into road bumps.

That doesn’t mean they aren’t still the “top” programs anymore, but it does suggest that more and more teams are playing good basketball from the jump. There is plenty of parity in the sport right now.

“I’m glad ya’ll figuring that out,” Kentucky associate to the head coach Bruiser Flint said during Monday’s pre-Bellarmine press conference. “Because ya’ll think we lost two games and the season is over. But I mean it’s one of those things — who’s more ready at the beginning of the year? One thing about basketball, it’s a long season. It’s not always about the start, it’s about the finish. As the season goes on, you try to get better. That’s the thing about basketball because you have so many games to try to get better.”

Kentucky certainly has areas it needs to improve upon, too, and the coaching staff would admit that. The offense struggled against UK’s two toughest opponents this year. The Wildcats shot a combined 38.8 percent from the floor overall and 13-50 (26.0 percent) from beyond the arc in losses to Michigan State and Gonzaga. But what Kentucky does in November will likely be completely different than what the team does in January, February, and March — the time of year when the games really begin to matter.

As has been pointed out many times before, Kentucky demolished last year’s national championship finalists during the 2021-22 regular season. The ‘Cats overpowered North Carolina by 29 in Las Vegas before smacking Kansas by 18 on the road a month later. Kansas went on to beat North Carolina in the title game that spring.

In college hoops, you have to play your best basketball in March and April. The Jayhawks and Tar Heels were able to do that last year while Kentucky seemed to run in reverse. The ‘Cats will have to flip the script this season, and there is plenty of time to accomplish that.

“We always talk about this. We beat Kansas and North Carolina by a combined 50 points last year and they played for the national championship,” Flint said. “We talk about that all the time, about how when you looked at those two teams everybody talked about how they were going to struggle. Those guys ended up playing for the national championship — Kansas won it. So it’s about us progressively getting better every game, progressively getting better in practice every day… Some of these teams that didn’t look good now, they’ll look good later.”

Flint’s point is that Kentucky can look underwhelming now and still enter the NCAA Tournament as a juggernaut, much like Kansas and North Carolina did. He referenced a familiar early-season talking point from head coach John Calipari, who has leaned on a lack of practice time with a fully healthy group to explain the slower-than-expected start. The message was still the same though: this group needs more time to learn how to play with each other.

“After we beat North Carolina, they were killing Hubert Davis at North Carolina, then all the sudden he’s the greatest guy in the world because his team played for the national championship. But that’s how it goes, that’s what fans do, but in the end, it’s about trying to progressively get better,” Flint added. “Sometimes it takes time. (Calipari) warned you. Because one of the things you saw from not having guys out there is we don’t have the people out here that we’ve been having. And your practices look different. And that’s why he said what he said about ‘Hey, it might take us some time. We’re not gonna be the same team now that we are down the road.'”

Unfortunately, with how the last two seasons played out for the ‘Cats, the phrase “it might take us some time” isn’t exactly music to the ears of the Big Blue Nation. But the full roster is together now and has been for a couple of weeks — progression should be noticeable moving forward.

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