Player meeting leads to defensive adjustments -- and best all-around showing of the year

Ole Miss scored just 63 points in the loss at Kentucky, the second-fewest of the season behind only 59 in the Rebels’ loss at Auburn on January 20. They converted just 37.5% overall and 22.7% from three while turning the ball over 12 times with 12 shots blocked — 10 from Ugonna Onyenso alone.

If that was your first time watching Kentucky play, you’d think defense was the Wildcats’ specialty.

“From my point of view, the combination of a high-turnover game and getting our shot blocked what seemed like a hundred times from where I was sitting,” Ole Miss coach Chris Beard said. “One player had a special game, just didn’t give us enough offensive possessions and we didn’t shoot it great tonight.”

Thing is, Kentucky entered the matchup ranked No. 126 nationally in defensive efficiency and outside the top 300 in scoring defense, allowing over 78 points per contest. The Cats’ flirting with a 90-point average on offense has been the team’s saving grace. Their effort against the Rebels was the outlier, not the norm.

But they’re looking to change that. And it stems from a recent team meeting, players coming together to recommend some adjustments as the regular season winds down. John Calipari took those suggestions and tried them out in practice before rolling them out against Ole Miss.

“We are doing some things in practice that they suggested to me,” he said. “Some of it is to hold them accountable. We’ve got to be held accountable defensively. So here are some ideas. We did them and we went with them.”

Among them? A full-court press, something the Cats experimented with from the opening tip. And it wasn’t to wreak havoc and force turnovers necessarily, but rather set the tone and get that motor humming a bit early.

“Pressure. We weren’t backing up. The start of games are bad for us because we’re back. We can’t be that way,” Calipari added. “My whole career, the first four or five minutes, we pressed — even if it was an ugly press. Not to press them, but to get my team playing with a motor.”

It wasn’t a perfect start with Kentucky down 15-9 six minutes and change in, but they managed to close the first half on a 25-6 run to take a 14-point lead going into intermission. Once they got their legs underneath them, defense put together its best stretch of the season by a mile.

They brought the fight and it showed.

“It was just picking up full court and being the aggressor, trying to get into them a little bit,” Reed Sheppard said. “Not letting them come down and have 30 seconds to run whatever play they wanted. Pick up, make the game faster — how we need to play.”

“We’re definitely closer, emphasizing (defense) in practice a lot,” Antonio Reeves added. “It’s just about coming out and being aggressive, being the first team to throw the first punch. We definitely emphasized that, definitely pressed up on them a little bit to say, ‘Yeah, we’re not going to let you score any bucket you want.'”

It all started with that player meeting and the suggestions that came from it, making adjustments to potentially minimize some of the fundamental flaws and beat teams with their speed and athleticism.

“Very important (the players’ voices were heard),” Reeves said. “We came together as a collective group and told each other what we needed to do out there. That’s what it really was, trying to press and not scare them, but make them uncomfortable on the offensive end. That’s what we should’ve done at first, but we figured it out now.”

Again, it wasn’t perfect, but it was a step in the right direction. And there is optimism the forward progress is here to stay.

“It’s just about connecting on defense. Without that team chemistry we bring defensively, none of this would have happened today,” Ugonna Onyenso said. “Hopefully this is going to be a breakthrough for us defensively. We’ve got all we need offensively, we just have to stay locked in defensively.”