Kentucky basketball is coming off of their third loss of the season at Georgia, and now face another quad 1 opportunity, but this time against a No. 14 ranked Mississippi State team. In their loss on Tuesday, the Wildcats seemed to have shown some common flaws that they have had in each of their losses.
For starters, Kentucky hasn’t scored over 69 points in any of their losses. Not only that, but their assist-to-turnover ratio takes a major hit, too. They have some concerning trends in their losses that they need to figure out. A major trend as of late, wins and losses, is their struggles to rebound and dealing with physicality. Why their numbers in these areas are drastically different in each of their losses is a question for Mark Pope to answer. He was asked about the trends in his press conference on Thursday and addressed each of them from the loss to Georgia. Pope says trends are more tangible to attack since they are common issues.
“It’s not triage where we have a bad team. We have a really good team. We didn’t play particularly well, and so there’s a lot of things where we’re just a little bit anomalous, where we just didn’t play great, and certainly Georgia had some contribution to that. We’re continuing to work on the glass right now. It’s interesting, because we’ve been one of the top defensive rebounding percentage teams in the country, and that’s kind of bit us a little bit. We’re rethinking some approaches there that hopefully we’ll see immediate progress on, because we’ve been really good, right? We gotta be good in this league right now with the physicality and the way this is being played. We’ve been really good in terms of ball protection. I think we’ve been number one in the country, I think we’re close, and so I don’t think it’s reinventing the wheel for us on the ball protection side, we just didn’t do it well in this game, and you take three offensive fouls that were interesting, and actually more than that just because of the wedging fouls, the offensive rebound fouls. The biggest contributor to our turnovers was actually the whistle part of the game that we’re trying to figure out. There’s certainly areas that we’re gonna continue to grow and fine tune, but there’s not a lot of total restructuring going on.”
– on Kentucky’s common issues in losses.
Kentucky will look to fully address those issues as they continue to move through SEC play, and Pope knows just how tough SEC teams are. The physicality isn’t going away anytime soon, so they’ll have to be ready for it every night out. The Wildcats will have their hands full in Starkville against No. 14 Mississippi State on Saturday, a team that likes to reek havoc.