Mark Pope acknowledges Kentucky's "weird energy" vs. Colgate

Tonight was supposed to be a feel-good romp at Rupp Arena — and it started that way. Kentucky led Colgate 17-0 until the 13:20 mark of the first half when the Raiders finally scored. The problem was they didn’t stop scoring for four minutes, going on an 11-0 run. Colgate stuck around most of the game, trailing by two at halftime and taking the lead on three occasions in the second half. Kentucky eventually pushed through to a 78-67 win, but as Mark Pope put it, it was a weird night at Rupp.

“We had some weird energy,” Pope said in the opening remarks of his press conference. “There was all kinds of weirdness. The 17-0 [start] was a little weird. I think it made it weirder. And then we got weird but our guys rang the bell the way that they do, and I was really proud of them.”

For the fifth straight game in a row, Kentucky started ice cold from three, with Koby Brea the lone Wildcat to connect from downtown until Jaxson Robinson hit a three with 15:04 to go in the second half, the first of four straight to help Kentucky take control. The Cats finished 10-31 from beyond the arc, the first time they’ve hit 10+ threes in a game since Nov. 22 vs. Jackson State. The three-point defense improved in the second half as well, with Kentucky holding Colgate to 3-14 from three in the second half after allowing 8-19 in the first.

Still, Pope isn’t sure what happened with his squad. Lamont Butler missed his second straight game with an ankle injury and Kerr Kriisa is out indefinitely with a Jones fracture in his foot but that doesn’t fully explain Kentucky’s funk.

“We kind of talked about it in the locker room after, we’re a energy monitoring, managing team,” Pope said. “The energy on the floor is really important to us, so we kind of were having that discussion through the game, trying to discover for ourselves why the energy kind of got off.

“Like, I don’t know if it was because of the 17-0 maybe it got off, maybe it was because they made some really good shots. Maybe was a little fatigued. Maybe was the rotation difference. Maybe it was not having either our point guards on the floor. Maybe it was just, you know, I don’t know. Maybe it’s probably — usually, it’s all those things somehow, right? A little different lineups on the floor, but, but that’s this game for us. So, we’re trying to become like masters of energy and games like this can help you learn a little bit more about yourself.”

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Pope was still thinking about the weirdness when he sat down with Tom Leach for his postgame chat.

“I was walking off the court kind of shaking my head just the famous, iconic words of a great song. ‘Mama said there’d be days like this’ just started rolling through my head. I don’t know why it was a little bit of a slog tonight.”

Pope credited the Rupp Arena crowd for helping his team shift the energy. During Kentucky’s three-point flurry in the second half, fans got on their feet with a rousing “Go Big Blue” chant, which is never lost on Pope.

“And then, I don’t know what it was in the second half, a five, six-point game at some point, and then all of a sudden, these brilliant 20,000 BBN members just stood up, man, and filled this gym with energy. And our guys fed off it, and they went on some kind of crazy run for two minutes.”

Pope constantly preaches the importance of taking the season one game at a time, to the point he apologizes to reporters for saying each game is the most important of the year. Coming off the big win over Gonzaga with the Louisville game looming on the horizon, it would be understandable for his players to be caught looking ahead. Even after a 17-0 start, maybe they were. Pope said it’s human nature.

“It’s actually interesting, because it’s not easy,” he told Leach. “Like, it’s human nature to have less emotion going into a game against a lower level opponent than it is to go into a game against Duke or Gonzaga or Louisville or anyone else, right? And so for us to be great at what we do, we actually have to fight human nature, and we’re very intentional about that, about understanding that this game that we played tonight is massively, massively important and we’re going in that way too.”

Hopefully, we get it figured out before Louisville comes to town.