Kentucky's season turnaround a credit to Kyra Elzy's impressive coaching job

Not even a full month ago, Kentucky Women’s Basketball was at its lowest point in years.

The Wildcats were 9-11 on the season, posting an incredibly poor 2-8 record in SEC play. 20-point losses were becoming a deflating trend, various injuries and one key suspension hindered any shot at continuity, multiple games were either canceled or postponed due to COVID-19, and no one appeared to be having any fun on the floor for UK.

If you pulled up social media, you wouldn’t have to scroll long before finding plenty of strangers calling for head coach Kyra Elzy’s job following every loss.

But that was nearly a month ago now. After the biggest win of the season on Friday night against No. 6 LSU, a lot of those “Fire Elzy” tweets from early February were hit with the delete button. What the second-year head coach has done to push her team over seemingly endless adversity is nothing short of legendary. Kentucky was so far out of the NCAA Tournament field just three weeks ago the team could have planned its offseason vacation right then and there.

Now, UK is a projected 9-seed, according to ESPN’s Bracketology, riding an eight-game win streak with a ceiling that I don’t believe is visible right now. That’s how impressive this group has looked in such a short amount of time. This isn’t even the same team anymore. Rhyne Howard, specifically, is playing an entirely different brand of basketball than her peers.

I have no words for Rhyne Howard. Kentucky's offense is playing at a level I didn't think they could ever reach.

— Zack Geoghegan (@ZGeogheganKSR) March 5, 2022

“Our confidence, most definitely,” Howard said on Friday about what has changed during this win streak. “After we got healthy and got everyone back, it was like all right it’s go-time. It’s either we go to the tournament or we go to the tournament, there was no other option except for us to start winning and having fun with the game.”

Sure, Elzy has Howard, a multi-time All-American, as a fail-safe, but UK’s young head coach is the primary reason her superstar rediscovered how to have fun with basketball again. Elzy never gave up and she made sure Howard didn’t, either. There is plenty to be said about how the attitudes improved in the midst of eight losses in nine outings.

“During that time, we were on a losing stretch and even though we did not beat South Carolina, I felt our confidence grow in that game, and when we came back in the fourth quarter, I could physically see the confidence in us,” Elzy said following Friday’s win over LSU. “And we just talked about it. From this point forward, this is what we need to do. We all need to hold ourselves accountable. The staff said this is what we’re gonna bring, we went through each individual player, ‘What are you going to bring?’ and it’s do-or-die right now.

“It’s either win or go home and we don’t want to finish the season like this. I was confident in this team. I knew we had enough. We were down and out early due to injuries and different reasons but this team is resilient. We didn’t have any quit in us, we just continued to battle.”

The South Carolina game Elzy mentioned is the last time Kentucky lost, all the way back on Feb. 10. The Gamecocks were ranked No. 1 in the country at the time and remain in that position as of today. UK fell by just nine points, but the gears slowly began to move as one. A team meeting followed that loss, and Kentucky has won every single game ever since.

“We had a team meeting after our last loss when everyone was back and was like we have to win, we have to play hard, we have to do the things we have to do to go to the tournament, and I think that’s what transferred,” Sophomore forward Treasure Hunt said on Friday.

That team meeting clearly paid dividends, but not just for the players. Elzy pushed her team to the brink and managed to bring them out of the mud even stronger. She was finally able to showcase just how talented of a leader and basketball mind she truly is. Against a Hall of Fame head coach in LSU’s Kim Mulkey, Elzy outcoached her, and it wasn’t particularly close.

Kentucky upset the No. 6 Tigers in impressive fashion on Friday night in the 2022 SEC Tournament quarterfinals, leading by 20 at the half before cruising to a 15-point victory, 78-63. Howard was magnificent, scoring a game-high 32 points as the entire offense was clicking all night. LSU had just one run throughout the game, which came in the third quarter and put Kentucky on their toes for the first time in the contest.

So what did Elzy do? Whip out a 2-3 zone that completely confused LSU (and Mulkey, who called two timeouts early in the fourth quarter in an attempt to solve the puzzle) before switching back to man-to-man a few minutes later, which allowed her ‘Cats to extend the lead back to a comfortable margin. Mulkey was nearly ejected in the closing minutes as a result of her game-long frustration.

Have no idea how they didn’t kick LSU’s women’s coach out pic.twitter.com/UTuU5oI14t

— Matt Jones (@KySportsRadio) March 5, 2022

Kentucky’s season didn’t have to unfold like this, but most of it isn’t Elzy or the team’s fault. Robyn Benton has missed seven games this season due to an ankle injury. Nyah Leveretter sat out early in the season for multiple games due to a non-COVID-19-related illness. Hunt and Jazmine Massengill both missed key games. Jada Walker has to wear a face mask right now after taking a serious blow to her nose in the regular-season finale.

And oh yeah, senior guard Blair Green ruptured her Achilles right before the regular season could even begin. There were several games early on where Kentucky had just six available players.

But most importantly, Elzy suspended Dre’Una Edwards for five total games, including a four-game stretch not long before Kentucky began its win streak. Edwards, UK’s second-leading scorer, was completely away from the team during that time due to “disciplinary reasons”. She clearly wasn’t meeting the standards that Elzy had set in place, but some time away remedied those issues.

One could argue Kentucky doesn’t suffer all those midseason losses if Edwards plays, but perhaps she doesn’t embrace and buy into the culture that Elzy is trying to implement if she does. During UK’s eight-game winning streak, Edwards is averaging 21.3 points per outing with five double-doubles. In the 15 games prior, she was at just 14.5 per contest with six double-doubles.

Elzy was never truly given a fair shake early in the year. Kentucky admittedly floundered near the end of the 2020-21 season and the slow start in 2021-22 didn’t do much to quell any concerns. But it makes make sense that, with the fully actualized version of her team, success would follow. Her players are healthy and executing the gameplan to near perfection.

Now just how far can she take them?