These Cats are Weebles, the popular children’s toy from the 1980s — they wobble but they don’t fall down.
First, the question was whether these youthful Cats could win on the road. That was answered with a 67-58 win in South Carolina one week ago.
Now the major question seems to be whether these Cats can close out games effectively after wobbling down the stretch for the second straight game, this time staving off Georgia’s furious comeback attempt.
“We easily put ourselves in a position where we could’ve dropped this and there’s no reason for that,” UK men’s basketball head coach John Calipari said of UK’s 66-60 win over Georgia. “We had this game in hand.”
The operative word in Calipari’s above statement is “had.”
The Cats’ largest lead, 17, came late in Saturday’s first half—arguably the Cats’ most energetic and well-executed half of the season—but they could never rekindle the form they found in the opening 20 minutes coming out of the locker room. In fact, without the first half UK probably wouldn’t have had the same luck in withstanding yet another late charge, one week removed from a similar situation in Columbia, S.C against the Gamecocks.
“Kentucky came out of the gate so strong that we were playing catch up the whole night,” Georgia head coach Mark Fox said. “We just couldn’t finish enough plays to get back all the way in it.”
What might’ve helped the Cats more were the absolutely horrid offensive performances of Georgia’s top-two scorers entering the game, Trey Thompkins and Travis Leslie, who finished a combined 2-for-17 from the field in the game, but it was also a confluence of factors.
It was a lack of toughness inside in the second half as Georgia out-rebounded the Cats 27-17 in the half.
It was the inability to make clutch free throws down the stretch as the Cats clanked front ends of one-and-one situations at the free-throw line.
It was mental errors by the Cats, such as the turnovers on back-to-back inbounds plays within the final minute, that could’ve resulted in much worse had UK junior DeAndre Liggins not bailed out his team by forcing Georgia into miscues on their resulting possessions.
And it’s those kind of plays from Liggins and the rest of the upperclassmen that UK needs on a regular basis to avoid slipping into a pattern of biting their nails during the final minutes of games.
“This team has to be about Darius (Miller), DeAndre and Josh (Harrellson), they’re juniors and seniors, it’s got to be about them,” Calipari said. “It’s what they accept, what they expect and they have to be the guys making plays down the stretch, not (the) freshmen.”
Miller acknowledged that the veterans weren’t making the plays necessary to close the games.
“I don’t really think we did it today, and that’s part of the reason that they had the comeback and had a chance to win,” Miller said. “I think we have mental letdowns really, we get up on a team like that and we don’t feel like the game is over, but we play like the game is over and we definitely can’t do that, especially not in this league.”
Going forward, the Cats can’t relax and merely toy with opponents after building big leads. At least not at a time when they are the basketball version of Weebles—so far, they’ve wobbled, but they’ve won.
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