Calipari: "We've got to start playing better away from home"

With Saturday afternoon’s 26-point loss at Alabama, your University of Kentucky Wildcats moved to 1-5 outside Rupp Arena and 0-3 in true road games this season. In those three road games–at Gonzaga, at Missouri, and at Alabama–Kentucky held a lead for a total of 23 seconds in 120 minutes of basketball.

All three of those games were lost before halftime with slow, lethargic starts Kentucky couldn’t recover from. At Alabama, the road struggles resulted in the program’s worst-ever loss to the Crimson Tide and the third-worst scoring performance by a John Calipari-coached Kentucky team.

It was so bad, the Wildcats needed back-to-back three-pointers in the final 30 seconds to break 50 in the 78-52 loss. What was all that 80 a game talk?

This is @KentuckyMBB’s worst loss ever in their 157-game history against Alabama (26 points) (previous high was 25 points on February 17th, 1990)

— Corey Price (@coreyp08) January 7, 2023

After the game, John Calipari said he probably won’t watch the tape and he may even burn it, but he couldn’t ignore his team’s ongoing troubles away from Lexington. Kentucky’s road woes were a major talking point in his postgame press conference and radio interview.

First, he said, “I’m disappointed that we didn’t play better because I thought we were ready to play a good game on the road. We’re going to have to prove we can play on the road. We’re going to have to prove at some point that we can play on the road… We’ve got to start playing better away from home. Just have to.”

Then when asked what he and his coaching staff can do better moving forward, he went back to figuring out what holds the team back in away games.

“If we can figure out the mentality on road games,” Calipari replied to Kyle Tucker’s question about the next steps. “We’re gonna have to talk it through.”

Shooting to blame, too

In addition to the team’s poor road mentality, Kentucky’s cold shooting —mainly the combined 3-for-30 performance by Cason Wallace, Jacob Toppin, and Oscar Tshiebwe—took a lot of the blame for the loss to Alabama in Calipari’s postgame remarks.

“First of all, you can’t have three starters go 3-for-(30)” Calipari said in his radio interview with Tom Leach. “Now we can say, well, they weren’t good shots. Go back and look, they were shots that were makable.”

Ball movement and spacing are also on the list of things to improve moving forward. Oscar Tshiebwe’s rebounding, too.

“One thing that we got to keep showing them, is that you can’t be spaced the way we are,” said Calipari. “And then Oscar, I just said there were rebounds that he got last year, didn’t get. Many of them, he was rebounding with one hand. Well, these guys are too big and they’re active.”

Against Alabama, Tshiebwe was out-rebounded for the first time in his career with a season-low six rebounds in 23 minutes. Tshiebwe is much better than how he played in the loss, which is why Calipari said, “We have guys that are good enough. We’ve proven it. We’re gonna have to prove we can play on the road.”

Kentucky has one week and one home game versus South Carolina before traveling to Knoxville to play at eighth-ranked Tennessee.

John Calipari’s Postgame Press Conference at Alabama

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