Kentucky 62 - 52 Old Dominion (Uncasville, Conn.) (No. 2,056)

OK, OK, I know there is a lot of anger out there in Cat-Ville this afternoon. You want to know why we didn't blow out an Old Dominion team who just barely survived their game yesterday with South Florida. Well, I live in the Old Dominion, and I feel pretty good about UK's performance. Let me explain why.

First, I hate watching Kentucky in these Thanksgiving tournaments. You have to play in odd arenas -- remember that hotel auditorium in Cancun a couple of years ago? There's always a lot of empty seats. And you play odd teams with which you are not familiar. The whole situation is tailor-made for upsets, and that's often what you get.

Second, Old Dominion is part of a great basketball tradition. If you drive from Virginia Beach, to Richmond, to Washington, D.C., and on up to Baltimore, you will go through one of the richest veins of basketball talent in America. This is the home of guys like Allen Iverson (Hampton, Va.), Alonzo Mourning (Chesapeake, Va.), Len Bias (Landover, Md.), and Grant Hill (Reston, Va.) Lefty Driesell (Norfolk, Va.) won 786 games coaching kids from this area, and he could barely coach at all. John Thompson, Jr. (Washington, D.C.) was an excellent coach, and he turned Georgetown into the country's dominant program until he got tired of recruiting. Gary Williams (Maryland class of '67) took a group of Mid-Atlantic kids to the national championship in 2002. In fact, since 2001, four teams from this region -- Georgetown, Maryland, George Mason (Fairfax, Va.) and Virginia Commonwealth (Richmond, Va.) have been to the Final Four.

But while it's a mighty basketball tradition, it's not one that is particularly congenial to Kentuckians. Tubby Smith (Scotland, Md.) tried to play Mid-Atlantic basketball in Kentucky -- and we didn't like it much even when Tubby was winning. The kids who play basketball in the Mid-Atlantic are extremely athletic -- a lot of them, like Iverson, were also football stars -- but they usually can't shoot very well. For them, basketball is a test of physical strength and determination. Really good high school games in Virginia tend to feature a lot of turnovers and fouls, and scores in the 70's and above are very rare. The one absolute -- which everyone in the Mid-Atlantic takes seriously -- is this: thou shalt not let the other team get to the hoop.

Now ODU is a very solid part of this tradition. Their coach, Blaine Taylor, is in his 10th season, and the Monarchs are 215-110 over that stretch. In the last two years, they have won 54 games -- and they might have gone deep into the NCAA's last year if they hadn't drawn Butler in the first round. ODU pretty much played five guys throughout this game, and four of them were either juniors or seniors from Virginia. (The fifth was a senior from Ukraine and, not surprisingly, he was the only one who could shoot.) So pretty early on, I knew we were in for a tough, physical game.

OK, now as we know from our years watching Tubby's teams, the best way to beat a Mid-Atlantic type team is to follow the strategy developed by the Soviets when they stomped John Thompson's USA team at the 1988 Olympics: rain three's on them. The sagging defenses preferred by Mid-Atlantic teams leave them vulnerable to the outside shot, which is how Florida blew out Mason in the 2006 Final Four. But ODU was smart enough to realize that Lamb is UK's best three-point threat, and they only let him get a few good looks at the basket. He went 2-5 from 3's, and everyone else went 2-8, so that wasn't the answer.

Another way to beat a Mid-Atlantic team is to employ a dominant big man -- but he better be truly dominant, and he's got to be extremely physical. I would have enjoyed watching DeMarcus Cousins take on the ODU front line, but they were a heavy load for Anthony Davis. I thought Davis actually played pretty well -- he had 11 points and 9 rebounds in only 20 minutes -- and he was not intimidated. But the officials were not happy with him for some reason, and he spent most of the game in foul trouble -- and actually fouled out with about 4 minutes to go.

A third way to beat a Mid-Atlantic team is to press them, turn them over, and force them to play faster than they like. But that was always going to be a tall order against the veterans from ODU -- and, in fact, they only committed 12 turnovers despite holding the ball for around 30 seconds on almost every possession.

Marquis Teague and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, two of our super freshmen, thought they had another way to beat ODU. They spent most of the day trying to slice through the Monarch zone and get to the basket. They had some success -- they combined for 19 points and 4 assists -- but they also combined for 11 turnovers, as the ODU defense (which is designed to stop exactly this type of penetration) was consistently quicker than Teague or MKG expected.

Prevented from winning the game in style, Kentucky had no choice but to grind it out. This, of course, is exactly what ODU wanted -- Mid-Atlantic basketball is, above all else, a blue-collar style, and kids from this region take great pride in their toughness and tenacity. As Kentucky also learned, Mid-Atlantic teams are not above the occasional blow to the head. But Kentucky had to play a bunch of games like this last year, and Jones, Lamb, and Miller were up to the challenge. And while the freshmen were unable to do much that was spectacular, they also showed an admirable willingness to mix things up down low. Possession after possession the Cats played tough defense for 25-30 seconds, and then battled ferociously for the rebound. This was very important -- Mid-Atlantic teams are often much more dangerous offensively after their first shot has been missed, because they are so good at grabbing offensive rebounds. But led by Davis (9 boards), MKG (9), and Jones (7), the Wildcats out-rebounded the Monarchs 41-31. They also held ODU to a shooting percentage of only 32.1 percent for the game (18-56).

And down the stretch, when ODU cut the UK lead to 50-49 while Davis (on the bench with foul trouble) and Jones (who was cold-cocked battling for a rebound) were out of the game, the Cats responded like champions:

6:54 to go: MKG scores in the lane and is fouled! He misses the FT but UK is up 52-49
6:35 to go: ODU misses a jump shot; Jones grabs the rebound
6:27 to go: Teague hits a layup and is fouled! He misses the FT but UK is up 54-49
6:01 to go: Teague steals the ball!
5:45 to go: MKG misses a jump shot, but Davis gets the rebound and is fouled! He misses the FT but UK is up 56-49
5:08 to go: Davis steals the ball!
4:44 to go: Miller is fouled AND MAKES BOTH FT's! UK goes up 58-49; game over.

You will notice from the above that UK continues to struggle from the line. Today Miller was 5-5 from the line, but the rest of the team was only 5-12. This is a problem, but I don't expect it to get much better -- it just seems to be how we roll.

On the other hand, I think the team will keep getting better in other ways. Calipari said after the game UK hadn't practiced its zone offense very much, but they will certainly get a lot of chances to do so before the year is out. Today UK beat a very tough and dangerous team in a difficult setting. Given that we just barely survived Princeton in the first round of the NCAA's last year -- and that John Wall and Co. went to overtime against a very mediocre Stanford team in that Cancun tournament -- I feel pretty good about our current position.