Oakland coach says Kentucky was 'best matchup' for Golden Grizzlies: "We have a chance."

John Calipari raved about Kentucky‘s opening-round matchup in the NCAA Tournament, the Oakland Golden Grizzlies, led by a longtime friend in Greg Kampe. The two actually texted following the Horizon League Tournament, joking that they’d probably be paired up in the Big Dance following Oakland’s 83-76 win over Milwaukee to punch a ticket.

And then it actually happened.

“Greg Kampe and I are really good friends. We go way back,” Calipari said Sunday. “He’s not a good coach, he’s a great coach. He’s been doing it there for a long time. … He could be coaching anywhere. There are all these jobs open right now, I don’t know why someone wouldn’t say let’s go get Greg Kampe. He’s good.”

As for the personnel itself, the Golden Grizzlies play a “tandem zone, kind of a matchup hybrid,” Calipari said, “but they’re also good on offense.” Trey Townsend earned Horizon League Player of the Year honors as a “big, strong kid inside” while they’ve got two absolute snipers in Blake Lampman and Jack Gohlke “who combine to take 20 threes.”

“When you have a chance like that where you can make threes and you got that one player that you can try to go to, it means you’re going to have a chance,” Calipari said. “You’re going to have a chance. We’re good, they’re good, let’s see where we are when we play on Thursday.”

But what about the other side of the battle? How is Oakland feeling ahead of the head-to-head contest in Pittsburgh? Surprisingly enough, this is the matchup they wanted all along.

For starters, it’s an opportunity to play the best of the best on college basketball’s biggest and brightest stage. Who wouldn’t want that shot?

“The matchup is really important. For me, this was the best matchup I think we could get as we were trying to figure it all out. I thought we would be on the 13-seed line because based on criteria that’s where I thought we were going to fall. The seeding of the tournament this year was so crazy, I’m just happy we’re in it. So I’m not going to complain,” Kampe said on Tuesday with 97.1 The Ticket in Michigan. “But if I could have picked a team that we were — I didn’t want to play Iowa State after watching them play Houston, I didn’t want to play Creighton because of their ability to shoot. I just thought Kentucky was the best matchup for us for a couple reasons.

“One is this is primetime, we get to play at 7 o’clock on CBS with the A-team on the telecast, all of that stuff. That’s what you want when you’re in this, you want your kids to have a chance to be in the spotlight. That was number one. Number two, you got maybe the biggest blue blood of them all. You’ve got a coach that — I think the guy in East Lansing (Tom Izzo) is the best coach in the country, but Cal is right there with him.”

It’s not just about the opportunity, though. In terms of playing styles and individual personnel, he liked his team against Kentucky over some of the other schools with similar seed-lines in the projections.

This was the one he wanted due to the Wildcats’ lack of interior scoring presence.

“You’ve got all that and then most importantly, they don’t score in the post, Kampe added. “For a mid-major, that’s an Achilles heels when you play teams that can score in the post. It really affects you defensively.

“So since they don’t score in the post, our ability to maybe guard the three and to keep the game slow, we have a chance. We really do, if we can keep the game slow and take the three away from them.”

That’s a pretty confident answer for a No. 14 seed. We’ll see if it holds up on Thursday.