Kentucky WBB will live and die by the turnover

The Kentucky women’s basketball team’s best friend is the turnover. Unfortunately, it’s also their worst enemy.

On Sunday afternoon, Kentucky forced 32 opponent turnovers in their 79-53 win over Coastal Carolina. In the same game, the ‘Cats also committed a season-high 25 turnovers. Although the ‘Cats pulled out a win on Sunday, they won’t be so lucky against SEC opponents if they’re that careless with the ball.

The bad

After the game, head coach Kyra Elzy discussed her team’s mistakes.

“Do not worry. We talked about those 25 turnovers,” Elzy said during the postgame press conference. “In practice, if we turn the ball over more than two times, we’ll have a development because that’s a run.”

Kentucky needs to develop sooner rather than later. The team’s lost possessions have quickly become a trend. In their first game of the season, Kentucky had just 10 turnovers. In their second contest, they had 18. In their third, they committed 25.

The good

Thankfully for the ‘Cats, their defense has had a similarly positive trend. As mentioned before, Kentucky forced 32 Coastal Carolina turnovers on Sunday. Against Morehead State, Kentucky caused 30. And, in their season opener against Radford, Kentucky still created 17 opponent turnovers.

When you do the math, Kentucky is, on average, causing 26.3 opponent turnovers per game; that’s top-20 in the country. For reference, the ‘Cats were only creating 20 turnovers per outing through three games last season.

Elzy is proud of her pressurized defense.

“I was happy to see us flying around loose balls, taking charges, and we generated 27 points from our turnovers so we didn’t put as much pressure on our offense,” Elzy said.

A work in progress for Kentucky

Kentucky’s impenetrable defense didn’t appear out of thin air. The steals, blocks and traps are the results of long talks, tough sprints and constant practice.

“They’ve been preaching to us our defense can turn into offense. We didn’t have a lot of transition points the previous two games, so they were honing on us about our defense and create transition points,” graduate student Robyn Benton said after the win.

As many issues as Kentucky causes for opponents, their own problems will catch up to them if they don’t improve. UK’s game against Bellarmine on Thursday will be their final practice run to mend these cracks before they head to the Bahamas to take on Virginia Tech and Dayton. If the ‘Cats don’t address their turnover issue immediately, they should expect trouble in paradise.