By Keith Taylor
Special to NkyTribune
John Calipari hasn’t given up on his team or hit the panic button.
Coming off two straight losses, including a 79-73 setback to third-ranked Kansas, the Kentucky coach isn’t ready to throw in the towel on the season.
“I’m not panicked, I wanted to win the game (against Kansas),” Calipari said Monday. “I walked away after watching the tape like, ‘OK, this stuff’s all fixable.’ If it wasn’t fixable I would have a different approach. But, the other side I would tell you is, we’ve got good kids. I mean, I’ve got a great group of kids.”
Consecutive setbacks to Tennessee and the Jayhawks dropped the Wildcats from fourth to No. 8 in the latest Associated Press Top 25 poll, but Calipari isn’t worried about falling four spots and likes where his team is headed going into the final six weeks of the regular season.
“I’ve still got the same guys that if we had won two games we would have had votes for No. 1. and I would have said, ‘We’re not No. 1 because we still have these issues,’” he said.
Those issues, Calipari said, include a variety of factors — defensive lapses, a lack of toughness, an inability to win 50-50 balls and turnovers. Calipari said most of his team’s 17 turnovers against the Jayhawks were because of “casual play.”
“Turnovers lead to easy baskets down the other end,” Calipari said. “We gave 21 points up last game from turnovers. You can’t win a game that way. The other thing becomes, it’s a 50-50 ball and I’m fighting for my life, I figure out a way to go and get those balls. Now, you may not get all of them, but you can’t give them all of them. The toughness late in the game, mentally and physically, that’s what I’m talking about.”
From a defensive standpoint, Calipari is looking for a “stopper” and wants all of his players to develop a better mindset on the defensive end of the floor. The Kentucky coach asked each player during individual meetings on Sunday if they were willing to be a defensive standout.
“I asked all of the guys, ‘Can you be a stopper?’” he said. “A couple said, ‘Someday I hope to be.’ But there were five or six that said, ‘I can be,’ or ‘I’m a stopper.’ Well, then why are people scoring on us like they are if you’re a stopper?”
During those player-coach sessions, Calipari also wanted to know if the Wildcats had hit a lull and “hitting that wall.”
“Is that part of it?’ ‘No, absolutely not,’” he said. “OK, let’s figure this out then.”
Although a long way from perfection, Calipari remains confident the Wildcats will become an empowered team going into the final stretch of the regular season.
“Until this team is empowered and it’s their team — until they’re doing this off of one another, understanding what each of them have to do and talking and – until their empowered, they can’t be the team they can be,” he said. “They’re still good, good team and good players. But you’ve gotta be empowered. Gotta be their team, not mine.”
Gametracker: Georgia at Kentucky, 9 p.m., Tuesday. TV/Radio: ESPN, 98.1 FM WBUL.
Keith Taylor is a senior sports writer for KyForward, where he primarily covers University of Kentucky sports. Reach him at keith.taylor@kyforward.com or @keithtaylor21 on Twitter