By Nick Gray

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The challenge of the 2014-15 UK basketball team is not its youth, size or talent but facing a tougher competitor than itself.

The one thing that may hurt them is the ability to challenge and motivate themselves between now and the SEC Tournament.

It was UK’s crux last season to challenge itself after being told it was the best team in the country before the season started.

For the first 10 minutes Monday at Rupp Arena during the Blue-White Scrimmage, both platoons went at each other like they had to prove they needed to stay on the court. The effort level decreased once the players wore down, but the public was treated to a high-level, high-effort period of game time — a rarity of Blue-White Scrimmages of the past.

“You remember Blue-White Games in the past?” UK head coach John Calipari joked. “Terrence Jones scored 50. We tried to guard people this time.”

As silly as it may sound, there are 25 games on UK’s regular season schedule in which the Cats have the clear, superior talent.

Monday, the talent advantages of the two “teams” were not as clear. The scrimmage pitted freshman forward Karl Towns against sophomore center Dakari Johnson in a matchup that would have almost certainly led an SEC Network game broadcast. Each player needed to prove themselves against one another because not one second of playing time has been decided three weeks before UK’s season opener. When facing talented player after talented player, the effort has to ramp up, or UK will struggle like it did against Florida in Gainesville last season.

But it won’t necessarily need that effort to beat the likes of UT-Arlington and Vanderbilt.

Who is going to prove more difficult for sophomore guard Andrew Harrison to drive past — Tyler Ulis or Columbia University starting guard Maodo Lo? Is Dakari Johnson going to find someone on UK’s regular season schedule more difficult to bang bodies with in the post than Willie Cauley-Stein?

In all but four or five games, the answer is no.

That challenge is what Calipari has to give these Cats.  Playing time was not enough last year — a first since he has been at UK. In October, he gave it to them in the form of something new and different with the platoon idea. However, even Calipari is in the dark about its effects.

“I don’t know yet,” Calipari said. “We’ll see in the games. We will have our challenges just like other teams have their own challenges.”

Sophomore guard Andrew Harrison, on the victorious Blue Team, believed Monday that the platoon system is not a motivational tactic, but more of an assist for conditioning and efficiency. Harrison also said Calipari pushes the players “where you either play well or you don’t play.”

That’s the mindset UK played with in the first half of its scrimmage, and needs to utilize to push itself throughout the regular season.

This team is not without its flaws — a dead-on perimeter shooter and iffy free-throw shooting, for example — but most of those can be discarded because of this team’s immense talent. However, the focus and effort cannot be dismissed, or else we may never know the potential greatness of this team.

For a university and its fan base that has seen numerous national championships, No. 1 picks and all else, greatness is how things are measured.