NEW YORK — We’ve seen how well Kentucky basketball plays and how high it can soar when it’s running fast and hitting on all cylinders. They lead the NCAA in scoring, averaging 91.3 points per game, and reeled off 10 wins in nonconference play.
Those up-tempo showcases aren’t the kind of games the Wildcats will always have entering SEC play and definitely not when the postseason rolls around and every possession matters in the NCAA Tournament.
UK just learned what it’s like when the 3-pointers aren’t falling and the shots aren’t coming as plentiful during its 85-65 loss to Ohio State in the CBS Sports Classic at Madison Square Garden.
“We’ve got to find other ways when the ball is not going in,” said UK guard Otega Oweh, who scored a team-high 21 points. “Defensively, I feel like we could spark some energy there, maybe get some easy baskets, cause turnovers, but unfortunately, we didn’t.”
The Cats need alternate ways to win games besides putting tremendous pressure on their opponents from scoring fast and easy. To put it simply, they need to learn how to win an ugly, low-possession game.
Ohio State had just been embarrassed 91-53 by Auburn a week ago in Atlanta. But the Buckeyes took a much more deliberate approach in picking apart the Cats. Head coach Jake Diebler was purposeful in how he slowed down the tempo at times as a way to take UK out of its offense.
Kentucky had just 67 possessions against Ohio State and scored just 0.970 points per possession, which was well below its season average entering the game of 1.222 points per possession.
“We tried to shrink the game a little bit with some of our offensive possessions and felt like we needed to make them guard longer in the half court in those moments,” Diebler said. “That’s a respect to what they’ve been able to do.”
Kentucky is about to feel a lot more respected this season.
This won’t be the last time an opponent, that’s perhaps less talented, resorts to milking possessions out of the game to limit the Cats.
A lot of teams won’t have someone like Ohio State’s Bruce Thornton taking the shots. UK coach Mark Pope singled out Thornton, who dropped a game-high 30 points, for exploiting the Cats defense after they cut a 15-point second-half deficit to six.
Pope said Thornton took advantage of a “schematic issue” he has to fix. Pope had been pushing UK’s bigs to the point of the screen, but when Thornton rejected his screener, that left the lane wide open for drives.
“We tried a bunch of different scheme changes and, at the end of day, Thornton was too good for us,” Pope said. “… Kind of everything we tried seemed like he had a pretty good answer for us.”
The game resembled in some ways the Cats’ only other loss of the season.
Kentucky also didn’t crack the 70-point mark in its 70-66 setback at Clemson, in its first true road game of the season.
The Tigers played more physically than any other UK opponent, and the Buckeyes duplicated some of that tough play.
“We just knew that pressuring the ball would be a key factor,” Thornton said.
It led the Cats to a couple season lows, shooting 29.8% from the field and making just four 3-pointers en route to 18% shooting from behind the arc. The previous field-goal percentage low was 38.1% against Clemson, and they were held to seven 3s against Clemson, Gonzaga and Georgia State.
Those percentages alone weren’t the ones that led to the loss.
UK attacked the basket enough to earn 32 trips to the free-throw line, which was second this season only to its 42 attempts against Western Kentucky.
But the Cats allowed Ohio State to shoot 57% from the floor. It was the first time this season UK allowed a team to shoot better than 50%.
These are the kind of neutral-site games that determine how soon the season ends in March. UK fans who turned Madison Square Garden into Rupp Arena Northeast with many Buckeyes fans presumably watching their football team in the playoffs couldn’t even help the cause.
“We just never could find the pace of the game,” Pope said.
Clemson and now Ohio State have provided a blueprint, and it’s up to UK to figure out how to turn a slower pace into a winning one.
Reach sports columnist C.L. Brown at clbrown1@gannett.com, follow him on X at @CLBrownHoops and subscribe to his newsletter at profile.courier-journal.com/newsletters/cl-browns-latest to make sure you never miss one of his columns.
