Kentucky's defense held Louisville to 62 points Saturday but the Cats' poor shooting still led to another loss. (Scott Utterback Photo)
Struggling Kentucky needs games more than practice time but what coach John Calipari says has really hurt UK is a lack of team building time, something he usually does in the summer and fall to bring his teams that normally are full of new players together.
“We are trying to make up time now,” he said.
But he also said you have “got to play games you can win to build confidence” after the Wildcats lost 62-59 to Louisville, their sixth straight loss after a season-opening win over Morehead.
Kentucky has lost to Richmond, Kansas, Georgia Tech, Notre Dame, North Carolina and Louisville. Calipari says it is the “stupidest schedule” he has ever put together for a team that returned just one player — Keion Brooks — who had scored in a UK game and he’s yet to play this year because of injury.
“I would like to smack myself in the mouth. We should have played games up front that we had a chance to win. Four, five of them, then play four or five of the others. Not eight hard games and we still got Texas left, who is like 10th in the country,” Calipari said.
“Think about it. Now am I doing that to me or to these kids? It was to these kids. It was just dumb. But we’re in it with all these teams, and we’re good enough to beat them. We haven’t figured out how to finish off a game yet. That’s on me. I’ll keep working with them. Maybe we’ll look at that as an opportunity and go from there.”
Maybe but that’s the same thing Calipari has been saying for weeks and the losses keep coming.
Players Davion Mintz and Jacob Toppin insisted after the game that the team had not lost confidence despite the six losses. Not sure fans feel quite the same way.
But Toppin also said not to blame the schedule and would not use it as the same excuse/reason Calipari did for UK’s 1-6 start.
“I’m going to have my coach’s back. We could have won many of these games that we played. This isn’t on him at all,” Toppin said.
He’s right.
“We need to play better and we are starting to play better. We’re not going to blame him making a tough schedule on our losses because we could have won the games that we played,” Toppin, who had 10 points and six rebounds, said.
“Our confidence right now is still high I think because we’re moving in the right direction. Every day in practice we’re getting better and we just gotta keep improving every day.”
He has to believe that or the season is over if players lose hope. It’s just at Kentucky almost winning or close losses do not inspire confidence or belief in better times ahead when it happens six games in a row no matter who UK, a preseason top 10 team, is playing.
Point guard Davion Mintz led UK in scoring with 19 points and rebounding with seven. He hit four of six 3-pointers. He had two of only six UK assists. He did his part but the reality is after transferring from Creighton to play on a national title contender, he’s on a 1-6 team. Creighton never started a season that poorly when he was there.
“I realize this is not about me. This is a lot bigger than me. We all want to win. None of us would have imagined this. We just keep fighting, we’ve just got to keep fighting,” Mintz said.
“At this point, we kind of throw away our record in our minds and we just go out there and play basketball and, like coach said, refuse to lose at this point.”
