As the hue and cry over hoops momentarily gives way to the arrival over Christmas, my take on Louisville’s 73-70 victory over Kentucky last Wednesday is that a sense of normalcy has returned to the dark and bloody ground.
In Lexington, John Calipari is well on the way to winning his eighth consecutive NBA Draft Day championship. If one of the byproducts happens to be an NCAA title, so much the better.
In Louisville, Rick Pitino is building a team that has a chance to win the tournament it missed last season due to a self-imposed ban for NCAA violations. If two or three players prove to be good enough to be drafted, sooner or later, so much the better.
The two coaches differ radically in priorities, style, and use of resources, which is why the pre-game story line is pretty much the same every season: Calipari has the most talent, Pitino tries to find ways to negate it.
Consider, if you will, Quintin Snider, the sophomore guard from Louisville Ballard High who laid a splendid 22-point, six-rebound, five-assist boxscore line on the Wildcats.
On Draft Day, he will not be in Brooklyn hanging around with Calipari’s latest batch of prodigies – Malik Monk, De’Aaron Fox, Edrice “Bam” Adebayo and Isaiah Briscoe. He will be watching on TV and preparing for his junior season.
Although Snider was Kentucky’s Mr. Basketball in 2015, Calipari did not recruit him and Pitino’s affections were so lukewarm that Snider signed with Illinois before reneging on that commitment when a scholarship opened at U of L.
The kid didn’t look like a natural point guard. He seemed a little mechanical, maybe a step slow. But he worked and improved. He honed the skills he had and developed some new ones.
And on Wednesday night, before a raving pro-Cardinal crowd of 22,700 that desperately wanted the Cards to end their four-game losing streak to the Cats, Snider was the best guard on the floor, although Fox did yeoman’s work trying to make up for off games by Monk and Briscoe.
Almost before the final horn sounded, Wildcat fans were trotting out their excuses. It was the young team’s first game in a hostile environment. The game came too soon after UK’s dazzling 103-100 win over North Carolina Sunday in Las Vegas. And so forth and so on.
But the fact is, U of L was better prepared and coached. Where almost everyone else was dazzled by the Wildcats glitzy show in Vegas, a show in which both teams employed the matador defense, Pitino saw opportunities for his deep, tall, and defensive-oriented team.
So after spotting UK some of its signature breakaways in the early going, U of L tightened the screws and forced the Wildcats into a slower, half-court game. They did it by taking good shots that enabled them to get back on defense and using a token press to slow, ever so slightly, UK’s ability to get the ball up the floor.
They did it by showing a zone defense that morphed into a man-to-man, and by showing a man-to-man that employed zone principles. They contested every UK shot, something North Carolina wasn’t able to do.
The end result was a game played at a tempo that was far more to U of L’s liking than UK’s.
Only three days after laying 47 on the Tar Heels, UK’s Monk was harassed into a 6-for-17 performance against the Cards that included only 1-for-9 behind the three-point arc. And, yes, the hand that always was in his face often belonged to Quintin Snider.
Calipari is so committed to his three-guard offense that he didn’t exploit UK’s advantage inside. Unlike U of L’s big men, who all would rather take a jump-hook or a fallaway jumper than take the ball aggressively to the basket, Adebayo is a beast when he gets it inside.
He made five of his six shots against the Cards, including a couple of smashing dunks in which he took it right to his defender. But there wasn’t nearly enough of that on a night when U of L bigs Mangok Mathiang, Ray Spalding, and Anas Mamoud had no answer for him.
A word should be said about Deng Adel, Jaylen Johnson, and Donovan Mitchell, who all played their supporting roles extremely well. Especially Adel, who had 18 points and six rebounds in 37 minutes, which tied Snider for the team high.
A couple of prized freshmen were non-factors, something their coaches will have to address sooner rather than later. Wenyen Gabriel started for UK, but had only two points and three rebounds to show for 12 minutes. For U of L, V.J. King was scoreless in only three minutes.
So what now?
For UK, it’s a steady diet of Southeastern Conference teams interrupted only by the Kansas Jayhawks visit to Rupp Arena on Jan. 28. They will blow through the SEC with no more than a road loss or two, and head into the postseason penciled in as a No. 1 seed.
For the Cards, whose next three games are Virginia at home, Indiana in Indianapolis, and Notre Dame in South Bend, the going will be tougher because the Atlantic Coast Conference is a far superior basketball league.
Yet Pitino said that his team has only “scratched the surface” of its potential, which could easily be taken to mean that he expects to the Cards to be in the mix of the most serious contenders when March bounces in.
So it’s back to business as usual here in the commonwealth where Pitino and Calipari have even more followers than that old fellow in the red suit who can penetrate households and hearts every bit as adroitly as Snider and Monk penetrate defenses.
Billy Reed is a member of the U.S. Basketball Writers Hall of Fame, the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame and the Transylvania University Hall of Fame. He has been named Kentucky Sports Writer of the Year eight times and has won the Eclipse Award twice. Reed has written about a multitude of sports events for over four decades, but he is perhaps one of media’s most knowledgeable writers on the Kentucky Derby