Mark Pope wants Otega Oweh to keep playing free: 'He's more efficient than he's ever been before, by far.'

Otega Oweh has been Kentucky’s most consistent and productive player so far this season, but like with everyone and everything in life, there’s still room for improvement. It’s not always pretty with Oweh. He’s someone head coach Mark Pope has to let loose more than others on the roster to keep him at his most effective.

It’s worked out well so far.

There is some push and pull with Oweh’s game. You want to push someone as aggressive as Oweh, who’s making over 53 percent of his two-pointers, getting to the line more than any of his teammates, and averaging a career-high in assists. But you also might want to pull him back from being overly aggressive, where he gets caught jumping in the air with no outlet or forces his way to the rim against multiple defenders for wild shot attempts.

There’s a fine line between that push and pull. But Pope believes the walls around that line are beginning to close in. That’s what he wants. What he doesn’t want is Oweh swinging too far in one direction. He wants to be as close to that line as possible.

“What we’re trying to do (with Oweh), is we’re trying to just narrow these parameters where we’re still going to bounce between the two walls,” Pope said on Thursday. “But our accuracy is going to become a little bit more higher percentage, if that makes sense.

“So there’s times when Otega has got an angle and where he’s got to go finish off one foot, and he’s actually made some great plays against Georgia. There’s some times when he races in there and he makes a play off one foot. It’s like, ‘Oh, this was a hard one. Wish we could have that one back.’ And so that’s the decision-making process. The game would lose some beauty if you could forecast it 100% of the time.”

Oweh leads Kentucky in scoring at 15.7 points per game. He has just 12 turnovers through 15 games played despite a high usage rate. It’s not like he’s bull-rushing the rim with his head down every other possession. His approach is still very calculated and he’s shown multiple times this season the ability to take over games on his own.

“It’s making live reads. He’s actually getting better and better at it,” Pope said of Oweh. “He’s still in the top seven percentile of most efficient players in the country. He’s more efficient than he’s ever been before, by far. And that’s not because he’s only landed on one side (of the line) hyperbolically, but it’s because he’s narrowing the two walls, still bouncing up against him.”

If anything, Pope just wants to see Oweh play more off of two feet than one. The latter, although still effective at times, is when he can get himself into trouble as a penetrator.

“The right answer is making the right decision between those two things more often, he’s doing a good job making progress there,” Pope added. “Super cool actually, but very frustrating, just like growth is.”

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