The bad news: Kentucky’s 99-70 loss to Alabama on Friday night was the Wildcats’ worst loss, by margin, in the history of the SEC Men’s Basketball Tournament.
The good news: Kentucky basketball will not play Alabama or Auburn or Florida or Tennessee or any of UK’s fellow 15 SEC hoops members for the rest of the 2024-25 season.
That might not be entirely true, of course. With as many as 14 SEC teams expected to receive invitations to the NCAA Tournament on Sunday night, the selection committee won’t be able to avoid pitting teams from the nation’s best conference against each other somewhere down the bracket.
Still, you get the idea. The long, difficult, torturous, surprising, rewarding, frustrating, painful, exhilarating, aggravating, even bloody — ask Otega Oweh — task of playing 20 games in possibly the strongest college basketball conference in the history of the planet is finally over.
“We talked about it since the beginning,” Pope said Friday night. (Or was it Saturday morning?) “It’s either going to tear you to shreds or it’s going to make you better. I think teams are going to decide which is going to be their path. If you had the fortitude and togetherness to make it, it can make you better. So that’s the challenge.”
On to the next dimension. On to the next destination. On to the next question: Will those bare-knuckles battles against its brothers benefit Pope’s club in the Big Dance?
My take: How could it not? Seriously. The AP Top 25 is bursting with SEC basketball members. Same for all the metric mavens from Ken Pomeroy to Bart Torvik to Evan Miyakawa to the quants in charge of the NCAA NET computer rankings.
Outrageously athletic teams? The Cats have played them. Uptempo teams? The Cats have played them. Walk-it-up teams? The Cats have played them. Primary zone defenders? The Cats have played them. Well-coached teams? Check. Poorly-coached teams? Check. No. 1-ranked teams? Check.
Better yet: They’ve beaten a lot of those teams.
Kentucky guard Travis Perry (11) is surrounded by Alabama defenders, including Crimson Tide guard Chris Youngblood (8), during Friday’s SEC Tournament game at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, Tennessee. Ryan C. Hermens [email protected]
Kentucky would like to be playing with a full deck against whomever’s next, of course. That’s more likely now than it appeared Thursday night when starting point guard Lamont Butler — otherwise known as “LaMarch” Butler — was headed to the locker room with a shoulder injury. Worst case scenario avoided. Imaging of the injury returned better than expected. Butler watched the Alabama game from the bench, but Pope’s prognosis Friday night was that his best defender should be available in time for the dance.
That’s not to say the Cats can take it easy before their NCAA opener. You don’t lose your last game by 29 points and declare the outcome acceptable. No matter the opponent. When I asked Koby Brea in the postgame locker room what the team needed to work on, he replied, “Everything.”
Ball handling is a good starting point. The Cats squandered a 10-point lead late in Thursday’s win over Oklahoma largely because of turnovers. Friday night, Pope’s club committed 16 turnovers. Nate Oats’ Crimson Tide happily turned those errors into 29 points. Several came off steals that turned into slams.
“The whole night we were a little stagnant in terms of playing in the character of the way that we play,” Pope said.
A healthier Butler should help. Same for Oweh. He committed five turnovers Friday. Then again, he operated much of the night with stitches in his lip courtesy of Tide freshman Labaron Philon’s “basketball play” elbow in the first half. He ended up scoring half of his 16 points per game average.
“I’m not in pain,” Oweh said afterward, his lips visibly swollen. “Just uncomfortable.”
It’s all about matchups, as they say. SEC teams knew each other to a tee. Kentucky’s next opponent won’t. That should help. Remember, these Cats recorded nonconference wins over eventual ACC champ Duke and WCC Tournament champ Gonzaga. True, Kentucky had a healthy Jaxson Robinson back then. It doesn’t now.
But it also boasts the battle wounds of playing the nation’s 10th-toughest schedule, according to ESPN. An SEC schedule. That counts for more than something. There’s your silver lining in a 29-point loss. On to what’s next. On to something better.
