What's still to learn from latest Kentucky blowout? Plenty for Wildcats
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- What lessons can undefeated Kentucky take from the Wildcats' 91-67 demolishing of an undersized, overmatched Auburn team in the SEC tournament semifinal on Saturday?
Can a team really learn too much from a game in which every single Kentucky starter was taller than every single Auburn starter?
Can a team that John Calipari has said again and again needs to be tested learn anything from a game in which Auburn held the lead for exactly 13 seconds?
Is there anything more Kentucky (33-0) can do -- in the Auburn game, or in Sunday’s SEC tournament final against Arkansas -- that will better prepare this team for an NCAA tournament run that could mark the Wildcats’ spot as the first 40-0 team of all time, and perhaps the greatest college team assembled?
Because as Calipari pointed out earlier this week as the SEC tournament was getting started, these games don’t matter. Unless you’re eyeing undefeated as much as you’re eyeing a national title, and Calipari swears he doesn’t care about going undefeated (although I have a sneaking suspicion he indeed lusts after that sort of greatest-of-all-time legacy). He’ll find out on Sunday evening about the games that truly matter, when the Wildcats find what teams will be in the way of their path to greatness.
And yet there were still things to be gleaned from Saturday’s victory.
First is just an exclamation point on Kentucky’s depth, which we’ve always known was this team’s greatest strength. Karl-Anthony Towns will almost certainly be the first Kentucky player taken in June’s NBA Draft. Against Auburn, he was in foul trouble and nearly non-existent on offense -- he didn’t make a single field goal -- and yet it didn’t matter one bit, as Kentucky had five others with 12 points or more.
Second was that the team’s leading scorer was Willie Cauley-Stein, a player who has been struggling and hadn’t scored in double figures for a month. He scored 18 points, with 7-of-9 shooting in 31 minutes, getting to the rim with dunks and making jump shots, too. It was the most aggressive and efficient he’d been offensively in a long while. And it came from a mentality that Calipari has been pushing him toward in recent weeks.
I asked Cauley-Stein after the game what felt different for him against Auburn. His answer was the perfect answer for this team’s mentality, where the best offense always flows off that dominant defense.
“It started on the defensive end and just carried over to the offensive end,” Cauley-Stein said. “That’s what I was doing in the beginning of the year was just making sure, ‘Look, I’m going to lock down on defense, and then if offense happens, then it happens.’ Today, it just happened. So that’s kind of my game plan going into the rest of these games.”
Calipari smiled when he heard the answer.
“That’s the Willie where you say, ‘Wow,’ ” Calipari said. “I like what he said. It’s all defense.”
But beyond the things we already know about Kentucky -- that the Wildcats have been dominating opponents this season with the nation’s largest average margin of victory, while at the same time they’ve won every close game they’ve been in -- there was something else Calipari wanted his team to learn. It was Professor Cal’s lesson of the day, something they can take with themselves into the NCAA tournament.
Kentucky’s biggest vulnerability leading into March Madness -- and if you asked Auburn coach Bruce Pearl, Kentucky doesn’t have any vulnerabilities; he called the Wildcats the best team he’s ever coached against -- could be the possibility of facing a transcendent scorer who has one transcendent game. Auburn has one of those players in senior guard KT Harrell. He averaged nearly 19 points per game this season, including dropping a career-high 29 on LSU a couple days ago in the biggest upset of the SEC tournament.
“We wanted to make sure Harrell was not the guy to hurt us,” Calipari said. “I told our guys prior to the game, I said, ‘Let’s look at this as an NCAA tournament game, and they got a guy that can go for 40. We’re going to make sure that we make that tough.' ”
And they did make it tough, holding Harrell to 1 of 12 from the field.
“We made a decision to let Willie guard him,” Calipari said. “Here’s a seven-foot, fleet-footed, long-armed guy guarding you, and you say, ‘What did I do? Why is he guarding me?’ . . . It was something for us to see we can do this.”
And so the SEC title game against No. 21 Arkansas matters, too. It matters because it’s key to Kentucky going undefeated, of course. But more than that, it matters to what Calipari says is the true goal: Winning the national title.
They’ll learn something about themselves from that game: How do they do against a team that presses for 40 minutes straight? How can they defend one of the best big men in the country in Bobby Portis?
And perhaps most important of all: How do they cope with the pressure of trying to become the first major-conference team since Indiana in 1976 to enter the NCAA tournament undefeated?
Email Reid Forgrave at reidforgrave@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter @reidforgrave.
