I'm listening to WLAP right now, and the Kentucky fan base is reacting to this loss about the way I expected. Did Calipari mess up the team by putting down the SEC Tournament? Are the other guys mad that Anthony Davis is getting too much publicity? Why is Davis shooting so many three-point shots? Why was the whole team shooting so many three-point shots? In general, the UK fans are reacting pretty much the way they react to everything relating to the team -- with unbelievable levels of intensity and analysis.
Personally, I don't do nearly as much of that stuff as I used to, because I have come to believe that "momentum" and "clutch performance" are the two most overrated concepts in post-season play. Once you go into the tournaments, everyone is pretty much playing all-out, and every team you play in the NCAA's usually feels pretty good about how it's been playing. Plus, there are all sorts of weird factors that come into play: you're playing in odd gyms, you're seeing teams you haven't faced before, the officials call games differently from round to round, and everyone is under enormous pressure. Under these circumstances, each game is a whole new adventure, and you can't really know what to expect until the game starts.
Consider UK's results over the last 20 years. Kentucky was on an unbelievable roll in 1993, but their outside shooting went cold against Michigan and they were eliminated in the Final Four. Kentucky got pounded in the 1996 SEC Tournament Final, but then won the National Championship. Kentucky pulled out thrilling SEC finals against Arkansas in 1995 and Mississippi State in 2010, but each of those teams collapsed in the Elite Eight. UK won the SEC Tournament in 2003 and 2004 -- but the 2003 team was blown out in the Elite Eight and the 2004 team didn't make it past the second round. On the other hand, the 2005 team was beaten badly in the SEC Tournament -- and they came within a double OT of making the Final Four. Last year, UK looked awesome in the SEC Tournament -- then almost lost to Princeton in the first round of the NCAA's -- then went to the Final Four.
So I don't think what happened today tells us much about what will happen next week. On the other hand, I think we can take away some key points about UK and Vandy. Let's start with the Commodores. It is almost impossible to overstate how much this game meant to Vandy and its fans. For decades, the Vanderbilt sports year has been dominated by Vandy's basketball games with Kentucky. Vandy fans, in their own quiet, button-down way, hate UK just as much as folks who root for U of L and Indiana. And it's not just the fans -- Kevin Stallings, the Vandy coach, seems to view Kentucky pretty much the way Captain Ahab viewed Moby Dick. Everyone in the SEC took joy in beating UK when Billy Gillispie was the coach, but only Stallings ran up a 93-52 score on the weakened Cats.
Plus, this was a huge game for the Vandy program, which brought back a lot of seniors and started the year ranked number 7 in the country. Vandy folk thought this may have been their best team ever, but at the beginning of the year, everything went wrong. Festus Ezeli, Vandy's excellent center, was out for several weeks with an injury. Just after Thanksgiving, the Dores lost back-to-back games in overtime against Xavier and Louisville. They also lost an overtime game to Mississippi State, two close games against UK, and a close game against Tennessee in Knoxville to close out the regular season. They had long since fallen out of the polls, they finished a very disappointing 10-6 in conference, and they hadn't even beaten UK. Today's game was a chance for Vandy's seniors to stake their place in history by winning the SEC Tournament for the first time since 1951, and they played like it.
Besides, Vandy's pretty good. I said they were overrated at the beginning of the year, and I still don't think they're a top 10 team, but Ken Pomeroy had them as the nation's 17th best team coming into this game, and that ranking would be higher if Ezeli had played all year. Vandy is also very well-suited to match-up with UK. They have excellent outside shooters who can stretch the defense, a big, strong center in Ezeli who can bang Davis around, and a veteran team who really understands how to attack Calipari's defense. Most importantly, they have Jeffrey Taylor, an eccentric player who often disappears in big games, but who is the one guy we've gone up against who Michael Kidd-Gilchrist cannot guard. Today, Taylor had 18 points and 11 rebounds, and MKG fouled out trying to guard him. In fact, MKG got five fouls in only 16 minutes, which was a major blow to the Cats.
For the first 35 minutes or so, the game played out about as you would have expected under the circumstances. Both teams played with more intensity than skill, and Calipari (trying to give his starters more of a rest than usual) relied a great deal on Darius Miller and Kyle Wiltjer. Those guys played pretty well, and Terrence Jones was everywhere -- collecting 12 points and 11 rebounds. With 5:23 left, UK was up 62-55, and seemed to be in good shape.
At this point, Vandy retreated back into a zone, and UK started holding the ball deep into the shot clock. The Cats really only needed to score something like five or six more points to win the game, and they had a lot of open shots. They missed them all. I don't mean they missed most of them, or they missed a lot of them. They literally missed their last 14 shots of the game -- many of which were open looks. To me, it looked like UK's legs were just gone. And they weren't getting any put-backs, either -- Vandy got all of the big rebounds down the stretch. And pretty quickly the lead -- and the game -- were over.
There is a hard lesson here for the Wildcats, and it's one that they had better learn before they start play in the NCAA Tournament on Thursday. On paper, UK is a good outside shooting team. They made 38 percent of their three-point attempts in the regular season, and 41.3 percent of their three-point shots in SEC play. But the main reason they shoot so well from three-point range is that other teams are so worried about their inside game that guys like Lamb and Miller are given wide open shots. Also, they tend to shoot very well in Rupp. Outside of Lamb, they don't really have a dependable outside threat on a neutral court against an athletic team. In three games this weekend in New Orleans this weekend, they went 12-53 from three-point range, for only 22.6 percent. (On the radio, they said the UK players didn't like the Wilson balls, which are different from the balls used at Rupp. But of course, they use Wilson balls in the NCAA's). Since Calipari came to UK, we've lost three tournament games. Here is our three-point shooting in those games:
03/27/2010 (W. Virginia): 4-32
04/02/2011 (UConn): 9-27
03/11/2012 (Vandy): 6-28
In each of those games, UK turned into a jump shooting team. Against West Virginia, I think they panicked somewhat. Against Vandy, they were tired. Against UConn, they had no choice -- UConn's interior defense was too good. But whatever the reason, it is bad news for Kentucky to shoot more than 20 three-pointers in a game. If it happens again, the Cats will be in trouble.
I still think this team has better shooters than the 2010 team, and they may have one or two good shooting nights in the NCAA's. But they can't count on that. This is a very good basketball team -- probably the best team we've had since 1996 -- but they will not have an easy trip to the championship. If they want to be national champions, they have to do in the hard way -- by attacking the goal over and over and over, by battling for every rebound, and by playing ferocious defense on every possession. In other words, they will have to fight like Wildcats.
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