Kentucky shook off a "bad" offensive night by playing its best defense of the season

For the first time all season, Kentucky finally had a bad night shooting the ball.

And by bad, I mean the Wildcats still scored 87 points, but on a 40.3 percent mark from the field and an 8-29 clip from beyond the arc. Some sloppy play prevented UK from putting its foot fully on the gas against Western Kentucky, even if the end result was a 19-point win. That wasn’t the type of offensive performance that fans have grown used to now six games into the season.

“It wasn’t a great offensive game for our guys and they still scored 87 points,” Head coach Mark Pope said postgame. “That’s the crazy part of it, right?”

This was the first instance of the season where we saw Kentucky win a game without the three-point shot falling. Eight makes from deep set a new season-low for the ‘Cats. Against a physical WKU defense, UK had to find points in the paint and at the free-throw line. 29 points came off free throws and 34 more from the paint — 63 of the team’s 87 total points.

But Kentucky’s ability to score inside the arc isn’t the reason WKU heads back to Bowling Green with a loss. That would be the Wildcats’ defense, which put on arguably its best performance of the entire season.

WKU was held to 68 points in the loss, just two off its season-low. The Hilltoppers shot just 31.8 percent from the field and 4-26 (15.4 percent) from distance — both season lows by a good margin and the lowest numbers allowed by Kentucky’s defense all season.

“I was really proud of us defensively,” Pope added. “There were several stretches in the game where we weren’t functioning great on the offensive end and we were finding great joy on the defensive end of the ball, and that is a winning formula.”

Pope praised the individual defensive efforts of players such as Jaxson Robinson, Lamont Butler, Otega Oweh, and even Andrew Carr. Kentucky held WKU’s leading scorer, Don McHenry, to just nine points on 3-16 shooting. He came into the night averaging 17.2 points per outing on nearly 45 percent overall shooting.

“We had to pay a lot of attention to him. He’s a really, really terrific player,” Pope said of McHenry, who was primarily guarded by Butler. “Our guys paid good attention to the scout.”

Kentucky’s overall team defense has been better than expected at this early stage in the season. The Wildcats rank 26th nationally, per KenPom, in adjusted defensive efficiency following the win over WKU. The competition hasn’t exactly always been up to par, but it doesn’t matter who is on the other end of the floor — UK’s defense has done its job and then some.

“If we can really find joy there, and if we keep going back to the well over and over and over and over again. We have a chance to win. We have a chance to win and win a lot of games and win big,” Pope said. “So I was thrilled with that tonight. It was really special. It might not be the most aesthetically pleasing thing, but it was an awesome effort on the defensive end by our guys.”

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