Porous Defense Continues to Plague Kentucky

Ahead of postseason play, Kentucky was rocking and rolling, scoring at will to win seven of their last eight games. Despite the success, the questions about Kentucky’s defense did not go away. Following the SEC Tournament loss to Texas A&M, John Calipari asked a simple question.

“We give up 97. How many games you going to win giving up 97 points?”

The answer is simple: not many, if any at all. Texas A&M started hot from behind the three-point line. One of the worst three-point shooting teams in college basketball (No. 356, to be precise) opened up by knocking down 8 of 14 attempts from long-range. They cooled off in the second half, but it didn’t stop A&M from driving to the rim whenever they wanted.

“We’ve been working on zone. We were good for a minute,” said Calipari. “You make a sub, one guy gives up two threes. Part of it, we hadn’t played it that much, but we were prepared to go to it if the guards kept getting downhill.

“But you got to have plan B in that thing. I think we do. Crazy thing was there were times we weren’t bad defensively. They just made, like, a tough shot.”

Calipari isn’t wrong. Plan B got Kentucky a couple of consecutive stops, but they could not capitalize offensively. When they did play good defense, Texas A&M made tough shots, a recipe for disaster.

“There were some times we had miscommunication, not enough talking. A young team, they don’t talk enough. A guy can’t hear what they’re saying and gets clipped a little bit.”

Antonio Reeves Absence Hurt Kentucky

The defense was bad. The offense was not great either. Kentucky did not get a great whistle and Antonio Reeves suffered from it. Kentucky’s leading scorer fouled out with 13 points in only 18 minutes of action. Calipari believes bad offense created momentum onto the defensive end of the floor.

“When you’re not passing the ball to each other, and everybody’s not touching the ball, it bleeds into your defense, too. But they did this to us down there, too. We knew. They only out-rebounded us by a couple… We just got to guard better. 87 points is enough to win most basketball games, unless they score 97,” said Calipari.

“We’re going to have to lock in. Again, I keep coming back to offensively, whoever I put in, we seem to be okay. Some defensive players may have to step in there and let’s get it locked down.”

Despite the poor defensive performance, John Calipari and the Wildcats aren’t giving up hope. The head coach said, “We just weren’t ourselves today.” I don’t think that’s true. Another statement he made confirms that what we saw last night was exactly what this team has been all year on defense.

“We have shown that we can guard the best teams in the country. We have shown that you can score a hundred on us,” said Cal. “We just got to lock in and know we’ve got to get better defensively.”