By Ashley Scoby
Special to NKyTribune
Kentucky players expected more from their performances in a 79-56 victory over Hampton Thursday night, and that mindset just about sums up their season. The win moves the Wildcats to 35-0, tied for the best start in NCAA history, and puts Kentucky five wins away from a ninth national championship.
Four Wildcats scored in double figures – Karl-Anthony Towns with a career-high 21, Andrew Harrison with 14, Tyler Ulis with 11 and Trey Lyles with 10. But it was a sluggish start and a ho-hum finish for an undefeated team whose standards are now otherworldly.
“I expected a lot more of us and I expected a lot more of myself,” said Aaron Harrison, Kentucky’s leading scorer on the season, who finished with three points on Thursday. “Everyone will see a different team on Saturday.”
It didn’t help either team that the previous game at the KFC Yum Center on Thursday went into overtime, pushing the Kentucky-Hampton tipoff past 10 p.m.
“You sit in the locker room that long, you kind of know that (slow start) can happen,” said Kentucky head coach John Calipari. “One of the things I talked to them after, you’re not going to do this on their terms. You can’t start games like this. You can’t do things that we talk about every day and you choose to do something else.”
But as it’s happened so many times this season, it all came together for Kentucky out of nowhere. A four-point game ballooned into an 18-point thrashing in a span of 4:53 in the first half.
Hampton had kept it close for the first 10 minutes, but a Pirates field goal drought that stretched out for more than six minutes, combined with 13 straight Kentucky points skyrocketed the Wildcats to its expected blowout. Towns made his third jump-hook of the day with 8:08 remaining in the first half, and that was the spark for Kentucky’s trademark “just like that” run.
Kentucky grabbed its first double-digit lead with 5:36 left in the first half after Lyles smacked Hampton’s inbounds pass, palmed the ball and fired an outlet pass to Tyler Ulis. Ulis recorded one of his three assists when he got it to Towns for a converted and-one opportunity. With that, the Wildcats were up 26-14, and another Hampton turnover led to Lyles dipping his way back inside the paint for a layup that doubled up the Pirates, 28-14.
And although that margin eventually climbed to 19 at halftime, then 35 with 10:25 remaining, it still wasn’t enough for the team that isn’t just chasing perfection in its record, but in its performance.
“We were fortunate to get that lead,” said Willie Cauley-Stein. “When we’re playing big-time schools, we can’t make those mistakes and do the things we did out there.”
Kentucky struggled from the perimeter, going 3-of-10 from behind the arc. Its primary shooters – Devin Booker and Aaron Harrison – combined to go 1-for-11 from the field.
Meanwhile, Hampton converted 13 Kentucky turnovers into 16 points. The Pirates shot 30 percent in the second half, a slight improvement from their 27.6 percent performance in the first half, and made three of their eight three-point attempts in the final 20 minutes. They pulled to within 23 at the 3:42 mark, but it was the closest they would come.
For a game whose spread was 34, it was almost a yawn of a performance from the nation’s best team.
“It’s tough to play late,” said Aaron Harrison. “It’s almost 1 o’clock in the morning now (post-game). It was tough, but we got it done, and we’ll be better Saturday.”
“We didn’t start the game the way we wanted to, but we’re sitting here, what did we win by? We win by 23,” Calipari said. “We were up by 30, whatever we were up, and I’m trying to get more out of these guys. But that’s how I’ve coached them all year. They know that.”
Ashley Scoby is a senior journalism major at the University of Kentucky and a KyForward sports writer. She has reported on the Wildcats for wildcathoops.com, vaughtsviews.com and kysportsreport.com as well as for newspapers in Danville and Glasgow. She will begin a summer internship with Sports Illustrated magazine in New York in June.