By Dan Weber
NKyTribune sports reporter
LEXINGTON — Basketball, at times, can be an exceedingly simple game. As it was for Cooper’s Jaguars in the opening round of the Kentucky Boys’ Sweet 16.
If you don’t let them score, they can’t beat you.
Thursday night at Rupp Arena was that time, and Ninth Region champ Cooper was that team.
Asked what he would have thought if someone would have told him his offense would struggle to score 50 points . . . and win by 15, Cooper coach Tim Sullivan had it exactly right: “I’d have thought we must have played our (butts) off on defense,” he said of his Jaguars’ 19th win in their last 20 games.
Bingo.
Cooper is not just good on defense, said Henderson County coach Tyler Smithhart, “they’re next level.” His team that won 25 games had tried to prepare itself for this moment by scheduling the best teams in Evansville, Smithhart said. But “watching Cooper on film isn’t the same as seeing them in person,” he said of the Cooper man-to-man defense. “We haven’t seen anyone guard at that level.”
Of the physical Jags who boast three starters who were here in Lexington in December with Cooper’s state-finalist football team, Smithhart said “They’re so connected, they communicate so well . . . they are a next-level halfcourt defense.”
On this night, with Henderson County running a box and one zone with that one defender doing everything possible to disrupt high-scoring Andy Johnson from getting the ball or a good look at the basket when he did and making Cooper’s other shooters beat them with jump shots, it wasn’t a bad bet for a veteran team that, like Cooper, was built on defense.
What Henderson County couldn’t have imagined is that after eight minutes of the first quarter, Cooper would have allowed the Colonels a mere four points. Or 12 after 16 minutes in the first half. Or by the end of the third quarter and 24 minutes of basketball, just 19 points.
But 50-35? In the last three years, a Sweet 16 loser has scored in the 40s nine times. But 35? The last time that happened was in 2022 when North Oldham beat Muhlenberg County, 36-32. So Cooper’s defense did something special here. Just as they expected of themselves.
“It’s Coach Sullivan,” senior Jaidan Combs nodded to his coach after the game, “he preaches that if you want to play for this team, you gotta’ play defense.”
And do special things, even if the offense is struggling. “You’re going to have nights like this,” Sullivan said of an offense that was certainly not hitting on all cylinders. “You can say we ‘struggled’ but we held their leading scorer to zero points,” Sullivan said of Henderson’s Cooper Davenport, who came in averaging 14.3 points a game and finished with just five missed shots in 31 minutes.
Johnson thanked “my teammates for picking me up,” said the Illinois-Chicago Circle-bound athlete who fought for every one of his 13 points while missing all five of his three-point attempts. “I figured I could impact things on the defensive end.”
That’s where senior guard Isaac Brown stepped in. “I knew Andy was struggling,” Brown said, after his 12-point night with the only three Cooper – or Henderson County – hit until sophomore sub Parker Lutz fired in a three to beat the final buzzer and get Cooper to that 50 on the board. “The lights are bright out there.”
Not too bright for the Combs’ brothers, who combined for 22 points (6-3 senior Jaidan 14, 6-6 sophomore Roman eight).
“To get to the Sweet 16, there are no gimmicks,” Sullivan said of this team, which has now used its defense to get to the final eight. But to go further in Friday night’s matchup against now-tournament favorite Great Crossing (with Louisville St. Xavier’s loss), “we’ll need to make some shots,” Sullivan says of his Jaguars who hit on 18 of 40 (45.0 percent) but only two of 12 from long range (a horrendous 16.7 percent).
The Cooper coaches would be staying up late Thursday trying to figure out how to slow down “the big fella’, “ Sullivan said of the Scott County school’s 7-1 Malachi Moreno, a UK signee who hit on 10 of 13 from the field and grabbed 17 rebounds with 21 points in his team’s 69-37 romp over Daviess County in the game right before Cooper’s.
And then it’s up to his kids, Sullivan says. “All you can do is trust them,” which is all Sullivan has done in this weird situation where he and his players — and a disappointingly sparse crowd of Cooper fans here among the 10,719 for the two games — find themselves in.
The Cooper principal has asked the only coach in the school’s history going back to 2008 to resign and every one of Cooper’s games could potentially be his last ever at the Union school.
SCORING SUMMARY
COOPER 10 12 10 18–50
HENDERSON COUNTY 4 8 7 16–35
Cooper (24-5): R. Combs 2-3 0-0 4-4 8, Brown 5-10 1-3 1-2 12, J. Combs 5-1 0-0 4-6 14, Rodriguez 0-4 0-3 0-0 0, Johnson 5-11 0-5 3-5 13, Hampton 0-0 0-0 0-0 0, Knuckles 0-1 0-0 0-0 0, Sullivan 0-0 0-0 0-0 0, Lutz 1-1 1-1 0-0 3, Hartman 0-0 0-0 0-0 0, Barbour 0-0 0-0 0-0 0, Philpot 0-0 0-0 0-0 0; TOTALS: 18-40 2-12 12-17 50.
Henderson County (25-7): Johnson 1-4 0-1 7-8 9, Davenport 0-5 0-3 0-0 0, Moss 2-3 0-0 0-0 4, Suggs 4-6 0-0 0-0 8, McKinney 5-9 0-0 1-3 11, Stewart 1-4 0-3 1-1 3, Davis 0-0 0-0 0-0 0, Thompson 0-0 0-0 0-0 0, Byrum 0-0 0-0 0-0 0, Little 0-0 0-0 0-0 0; TOTALS: 13-31 0-7 9-12 35.
Boys basketball state tournament at Rupp Arena
FRIDAY
• Ashland Blazer (24-7) vs. Bowling Green (29-6), 11 a.m.
• Jeffersontown (27-6) vs. South Oldham (30-5), 1:30 p.m.
• North Laurel (23-10) vs. Montgomery County (23-10), 6 p.m.
• COOPER (24-5) vs. Great Crossing (32-4), 8:30 p.m.
SATURDAY
• Semifinal games, 11 a.m. and 1:30 pm.
• Championship game, 7:30 p.m.