Vandy and Georgia play each other tomorrow, so one of those teams will move to 7-4 and the other will be tied with us for 3rd place with five games left.
The good news is the Cats got punched in the mouth early and still won. MSU hits threes left and right and we still won. Miller played injured and well we still won. MSU hits 17-19 from the line and you get the gist, we still won.
Another good piece of news is Jimmy Dykes seemed to put his bag of lines away tonight. No guard the yard or discussing the nail in the floor tonight. He almost started riding the “hot hands” pertaining to defensive hands line but dropped it and never mentioned it again…good call, once is good, ten times is bad.
The bad news is the two most obvious questions:
1) What in the world was ESPN thinking with the camera angle from the wasp nest speakers??? Chalk that one up as a big fail. There is a reason why people pay more money (or sneak past the guys in blue blazers) to watch from a more floor angle. It was used less in the second half, so hopefully they realized how horrible of an idea that was…wow…people are actually getting paid to make decisions like that???
2) What is the deal with giving up the wide open threes??? MSU took up where Vandy left off and went 12-22 from three tonight. Before the Louisville game I felt confident about the Cards game because Louisville is an all “jack the three up” type of team and up to that point we guarded the three quite well, in which we did again against Louisville…
Right now…not so much… yes some of their threes were guarded well and there wasn’t much else that we could have done. Other times we decided to double up down low or got lost on the screen or everyone collapses on the driver and they kicked it out for the wide open shooter.
There was one play in the second half where they had the entire left side of the court…not a single UK defender in the area with several MSU players’ wide open. I’m sure Cal was just shaking his head on that one…no excuse for that.
The offense isn’t bad; the defense continues to struggle overall. This is the most points UK has allowed in a win since Sam Houston St. last season on 11/19/09, in a 102- 92 win.
Rebounding was a little less frustrating compared to Vandy but MSU still outrebounded us 26-23. The Vandy game we gave them several, several plays where they had three chances at scoring and they burned us every time. When you let the opposing team shoot ball until they score in a “everybody gets a prize” type of defense…the results tend to not work out for you.
I didn’t see this happen a whole lot tonight. We had a ton of one and outs with only three offensive rebounds the whole game. Luckily we shot 32-57 (56.1%) from the field. If you knock it down the first time, offensive rebounds aren’t necessary…
We tried our best to make it a game again at the end. We don’t handle the press well, if it wasn’t for the fact that a fast pace game is our style, teams would press us more. At the end they pressed us and they made it very hard for us. When you have ball handlers in Liggins, Lamb, Knight with Miller and Jones not being bad this should not be an issue.
As for Sidney, he clearly is not conditioned and any team still in the game with ten minutes left in the game should be in good shape as Sidney will either be out or ineffective. We got lucky they didn’t feed him the ball more in the 1st half.
They could have easily gotten us in foul trouble early or score quite a bit early with him. Harrellson couldn’t hold him on his own early. Sidney is going to get tired late either way, might as well allow him to dominate until he does get tired. Then hopefully when he is out, our bigs are out with foul trouble as well…
MSU is better than their record because of the suspensions and Sidney still learning to play the game. They will be a tough out in the SEC tourney.
Stats tonight: Knight leads the way with 24. This is his 11th 20 plus game as a freshman. Prior to this season Patterson and Rex Chapman tied for the most 20 plus points a game as a freshman for UK with 9. Knight is now two ahead of them with many more games left.
Lamb-20, Jones-17, Miller-13, Harrellson-9, Liggins-2. Vargas should have scored but chose to miss the dunk and then go down the floor, get out of position and foul the shooter…
Johnson led MSU in scoring with 21, Steele with a quiet 17 going 5-7 from three and Bost with 16.
Did not shoot well from the line especially at the end, finished 12-18 (66.7%). As mentioned earlier MSU shot 17-19 (89.5%) from the line.
We shot 9-22 (40.9%) from three and as mentioned earlier MSU shot 12-22(54.5%).
We did lead all game in the turnover margin, made it a little closer at the end. MSU ended up with 14 to our 10.
Cal after the game: “Where was the fire at the beginning? You know why I don’t like team meetings now? “ (in reference to the UK players having a player only meeting after the Vandy loss, it apparently didn’t set them on fire right out of the gate).
“You want to know what I said at the halftime? How are we only down 1 point, we should be down 20. We got lucky. Understand I heard the coach say they are going to foul.”
So Cal told Knight to shoot when they foul and on the first foul he didn’t. Cal yelled at him and on the second try he did. Cal didn’t think the first ref was going to call it a shot but the second ref stepped in and said you got to give him three for that.
(Personally, I’ve watched this several times on DVR and he is fouled before Knight throws his arms up acting like he was shooting. Knight wasn’t given the chance to put up the shot, even if he wanted to shoot it….we got lucky on that one).
“This was a good win for us. After you lose a few games you need to get back on track and we did.”
Liggins is playing unselfish, he is back to rebounding, scores when he needs to and he is passing.
Last year Cal was playing ten guys and if three wasn’t playing well, just play the other seven. This year he can’t do that.
This league is good. We will have at minimum five SEC tourney teams. Yes other conferences have some really good teams but the rest of their league isn’t as strong as our “lesser” teams.
Before this game our RPI was 14 and our strength of schedule was 10 and that is with being 5-5 in our league. That says a lot about how good our conference is.
Next up is South Carolina at home Saturday at 4 eastern in Rupp Arena. South Carolina continues to be the only SEC road win. USC jr. started out 3-1 in the conference but since has went 1-5 in the conference, for a 4-6 record in the SEC. Their only win came against a poor LSU team. Despite this, we can expect their guards to go off in another battle in Rupp. They play at Tennessee tomorrow before heading to Lexington.
Go Cats! Beat USC!
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