John Calipari (SEC Photo)
Even if you have not been in Rupp Arena this season you have been able to hear a lot from Kentucky coach John Calipari during games. With limited fan attendance, it’s been especially easy to hear Calipari screaming “go” to his team often during games and recently to hear him yell “shoot” to various players.
Does that “screaming” impact different players in different ways?
“I think if you went to any school right now with COVID you could hear the coach screaming to be honest with you. You’re going to hear the coach talk. You just pay attention to Coach Cal because that’s who you cover,” UK assistant coach Bruiser Flint said during a Zoom conference Monday to discuss tonight’s game at Alabama.
“But I think if you were to go to any other schools you would hear the same thing. I think you could ask that question to any person at any university at this point in time because of the situation that we’re in with no fans or anything like that. I’m sure you’ve covered him for a long time, so you know how he is; you’re just hearing him now because there are no fans.”
Maybe Calipari just needs to get tossed again tonight at Alabama like he did at Mississippi State when Dontaie Allen erupted for seven 3-pointers and UK won in double overtime with Flint taking over the team?
“You guys loved that one, huh?” Flint laughed and said. “Did we score in the 60s in the game that we won at Mississippi State?”
Kentucky got 78 points, but only 61 in overtime. Still, UK is 5-0 when scoring 66 or more points and 0-9 when scoring 65 or less. That’s a big-time trend.
“One of the biggest things for us is turnovers. When we get in trouble, we turn the ball over. If you don’t turn the ball over, you get more opportunities to score yourself,” Flint said. “So, if you have a low-turnover rate and have a low-points-off-turnovers rate, we’ll score more points. LSU, I want to say they scored less than 10 points off turnovers and we scored in the 80s.
“It’s all about how we handle the ball. When we handle the ball better and we take care of the ball, we’ll score more points. But if you continually throw it away and you’ve got 19 to 20 turnovers in those games, you’re not going to score that many points.”
