Column: Wall, Cats turn over new problem with Heels

In terms of the relationship between Johns Calipari and Wall, this season has been pretty pristine.

Monday in Louisville, though, player and coach had a hard time finding a happy medium in one column on the box score.

It wasn’t that Wall attempted no free throws or that he didn’t attack the boards, an area in which Calipari has said several times that the guards struggle.

No, the minor rift Monday was because of turnovers.

And Calipari’s bone to pick was because Wall and the Cats didn’t have enough.

Wall finished against UNC Asheville with 14 assists and just one turnover, career bests in both categories. UK as a team had just eight mishandles, nine below the season average.

Even against an opponent as athletically mismatched as UNC Asheville was, that has to be one of the main points of pride after the game, right?

“We need to have at least 11 or 12 (turnovers),” Calipari said. “You have eight turnovers, that means you’re not being aggressive enough. They laughed when I said that in (the locker room). They said, ‘Did you say we had too many? Now you say we don’t have enough.’ But I just don’t think, when you have eight turnovers, you play with enough aggressiveness.”

Talk about splitting hairs.

On one hand, you can tell the Cats, especially Wall, weren’t using their athletic advantage to drive the ball in the lane. If they had, neither Wall nor Patrick Patterson would have gone the entire game without a trip to the free-throw line. Instead, UK used its length to shoot jumpers and throw alley-oops over the Bulldog defense.

But even if the Cats weren’t being aggressive enough for Cal’s finicky taste, they still did enough to beat another Division I squad by 37 points. There’s a lot to be said for a team that can find ways to win by such large margins while minimizing errors on the ball.

UNC Asheville coach Eddie Biedenbach looked at it from another angle. He said the Cats used Monday’s game to gain confidence with the ball.

“They played smarter than they had been playing,” he said.

But it’s a coach’s job to find a bone to pick, right? No matter how trivial the issue, no game is perfect for a coach unless nets come down afterward. Especially on a team with such youth, the players are relying on coaching to get them through this first stretch of season. What if Cal says, “Eight turnovers, that was perfect!”?

Saturday against North Carolina, would the Cats try to take it to the basket? Or would they rather throw lobs and shoot jumpers, and rely on a freshman big man like DeMarcus Cousins scoring a ton of points once the game is already out of hand?

After all, that’s the ticket to limiting the team to eight turnovers.

Such a strategy may work against a UNC Asheville, but not against the UNC. The Tarheels are too strong, too fast, too long and too well-coached (even with Roy Williams in a sling) to beat in that manner.

Wall said he’s never heard of a coach telling a team it didn’t commit enough turnovers. If the Cats win and have just eight on Saturday, though, Wall said he thinks it’ll be OK. He’s probably right.

James Pennington is a journalism senior. E-mail [email protected].