It’s an impressive run. The Kentucky Wildcats are 25-1, 11-0 in the SEC, ranked No. 1 in the nation with some of the best offensive and defensive numbers in school history and two players, Doron Lamb and Anthony Davis, who are among the top-10 offensive producers in the nation and should be runaway All-Americans.
But how good are the Wildcats, really? And how would they stack up against teams that are now recognized as the greatest of all time?
The answer: They’re pretty darned good. Of course, you have the naysayers who point out the Southeastern Conference is not the Big Ten or even the Atlantic Coast, but those same arguments could have been made throughout history. How many “great” teams did UCLA beat from 1966 to 1968 when they lost only one game and captured two national championships? And what were the regular-season records of the teams Indiana beat in 1975-76, the last time a major college basketball team went undefeated?
Anything could happen in the remaining weeks before March Madness. Kentucky still has Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Vanderbilt, Georgia and Florida (in Gainesville) to play before any regular-season retrospectives can be written. But the Wildcats have won 25 games by an average of 16.7 points, and they beat a top-10 Florida team by 20.
The most ridiculously impressive number is points per possession. In conference play, the Wildcats have averaged 1.2 points every time they have touched the ball, while allowing their SEC opponents only 0.9 points per possession. That’s an average difference of 0.2 points on every single possession of the game.
It’s no wonder John Calipari’s squad has made so many opponents look like junior-varsity teams. Consider that Ohio State, the best defensive team in the country, averages only 1.1 points per possession while giving up 0.9 (a differential of 0.2) and Syracuse, the team widely regarded as Kentucky’s biggest tournament threat, is scoring 1.1 points per possession in the Big East, while giving up 1.0.
If the Wildcats’ streak continues, and if they achieve Coach Cal’s preseason goal of “winning one more tournament game than we did last year,” then the debate about this team’s place in history will get heated. But it will take years of looking through the far-sighted lens of hindsight before this team’s proper place can be measured.
Right now, they aren’t the best Kentucky team of the past 20 years.
Rick Pitino’s 1995-96 squad had four starters who shot better than 40 percent from outside the three-point line, and every starter averaged at least one steal per game. That team set an NCAA record, winning six tournament games by an aggregate of 129 points.
Then there are the teams considered the best of all time: John Wooden’s UCLA squads that won seven championships in a row and produced such legends as Bill Walton and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; Jerry Tarkanian’s 1990 UNLV team that beat Duke in the championship game by 40; and the Blue Devils team that bounced back from that defeat to win back-to-back titles in 1991 and 1992 with Grant Hill, Bobby Hurley and Christian Laettner.
These Wildcats might someday warrant mention in the same conversation with those teams, but it will be a long time coming.
Right now, Kentucky is more like Dean Smith’s North Carolina squad of 1981-82: good but not yet legendary, with a long road and some close calls ahead before reaching the top.
Of course, that ’82 team had Sam Perkins, James Worthy and a skinny freshman named Michael Jordan who hit the buzzer-beater in the championship. But at the time, they weren’t superstars. They were just a solid squad that played tough defense and did what it took to win.
That’s the same kind of team Kentucky is today. Only time will tell if this Wildcat squad will have a similarly historic future.
