NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- All season long, this is what Kentucky has done.
Down five at half to Buffalo back in November, the Wildcats ended up winning by 19. Tied at half to Texas in December, they held the Longhorns to 25 points in the second half and won by 12. In January, two teams that would sit on the bubble come March -- Ole Miss and Texas A&M -- took Kentucky to overtime before the Wildcats won. In February, Florida had Kentucky in a one-possession game in Gainesville with a minute left before Kentucky won by seven. In its next game, Kentucky was down three to LSU with a few minutes left before pulling out that win, too.
Sure, Kentucky has had its share of blowouts so far in its 32-0 march toward history. After all, the Wildcats do have the nation's largest margin of victory at 21.2 points.
The signature move from this team -- and what we saw again on Friday, when Kentucky dispatched Florida, 64-49, in its opening game of the SEC tournament -- is to allow a far less-talented team to hang around well into the second half.
And then that's when Kentucky chokes the life out of its opponent.
"It's our defense," Kentucky small forward Trey Lyles said after the 15-point win. "Defensively we get to a point in the game where we know we need to lock down and make stops and change the game around. We try to do that every game. When the second half comes around, at that 10-minute mark, that's when we usually get on our run defensively. Teams seem to get a little tired, a little worn down, and we're still going."
In front of an afternoon crowd in Nashville that felt like it was roughly 99.8 percent Big Blue Nation, Florida hung around a little bit longer than most teams have against Kentucky. With less than eight minutes to go, the Gators were only down five, and still in the game. At least that's what you'd think if this was the first time you saw Kentucky this year. If you'd seen this team before, though, you never really had any doubt what was going to happen.
What happened was this: Kentucky simply wore Florida down. The fresh legs of this team's extraordinary depth proved too much for Florida, and in the game's final eight minutes, Florida scored a grand total of four points.
Even though it seems that this is Kentucky's perfect recipe for 40-0 -- hang around, then vanquish, then repeat -- this is not perfectly acceptable to head coach John Calipari. He was grousing after the game about his team's lack of energy out of the starting gate, and about how he chewed them out at halftime.
He's been talking to his players about competing against themselves, improving on the margins. The last few weeks have been about adding two or three percent to each player's game, Calipari said: Lyles flying up and down the court and attacking the backboard, Aaron Harrison taking it harder to the basket, Andrew Harrison being more of a playmaker. Karl-Anthony Towns said what this team is concentrating on is just trying to scratch the surface of its potential.
If the Wildcats do that -- improve on the margins -- then perhaps Kentucky avoids in the NCAA tournament the nail-biting wins its become used to this season. But that doesn't seem all that likely, does it? If Kentucky is cutting down nets in Indianapolis in April, you know it'll be after a slew of games where they trailed at half, dawdled a bit at the beginning of the second half, then went on that signature mid-second half run.
"They have a will to win," Calipari said about his players. "We have enough playmaker type of guys, Andrew to Aaron to Karl, now to Trey, to Tyler. We got a lot of guys that aren't afraid to make the play. To be those kind of players, you cannot be afraid to make the game-winning play. None of those kids are. They will take it. If they miss it, they will live with the result."
Kentucky players know the energy level, especially at the beginning of games, is a problem they need to get over. The deeper into March, the higher quality the opponent, the less of a margin for mistakes. I asked Devin Booker about this after the game. He acknowledged that this team can sometimes overlook their opponents.
But because of this team's signature â the way they're able to turn things up late in games -- Booker knows the Wildcats have been able to afford early game sluggishness. So far.
"Our team's so deep," Booker said. "Toward the end of the game, we still have fresh legs and the other team is worn down. That's the advantage of having a deep team. When we have that mindset, we come out of a timeout and say, 'We need five straight stops.' And we go out there and get those five straight stops. We've been tested plenty of times this year, and we've responded well to all of them."
Email Reid Forgrave at reidforgrave@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter @reidforgrave.
