Point guard Devin Askew, right, and his UK teammates had to watch another win slip away Saturday. (SEC Photo)
Like he often does after a Kentucky loss, coach John Calipari explained his players are “not robots, not machines.” However, this time the UK coach made no attempt to hide his disappointment with his team’s overall play in Saturday’s 71-67 loss to Florida.
“The disappointing thing is this team fought to get in a good position so something good could happen and it could but guys did not show up. Was it the anxiety of the game that wore you out? I do not know but we were not the same team today,” Calipari said
Kentucky had won three straight games and was coming off a win at Tennessee. The Cats had also beaten Florida 76-58 in early January. The Cats bolted out to a 10-point lead in the opening nine minutes and scored 26 points. But once Florida went to a zone defense that all but dared UK to shoot outside, the flow of the game slowed for the Cats.
The Cats were only 19 of 48 from the field — 39.6 percent — and in the second half missed 18 of 27 shots, including 10 of 11 from 3-point range where Calipari estimated at least five of them were wide-open shots.
“Give them credit. Florida did what they had to do,” Calipari said. “We had our chances to go win and we don’t make plays. No daggers. Take a bad shot instead of trying to get fouled and just throw it at the basket. That is losing basketball.”
The only field goal UK got in the final four minutes was a driving shot by Isaiah Jackson. Down 67-65, Kentucky’s Davion Mintz missed a 3-pointer but the Cats got the ball back. Calipari called timeout with 37.3 seconds left but the inbounds play resulted in a contested 3-pointer from the corner by Olivier Sarr just before the shot clock expired that had no chance of going in.
“The strategy was to get a shot up,” Sarr said. “Davion was not open and I saw (point guard) Devin (Askew) was stuck (with the ball). He threw me the ball and I took a shot.”
Calipari didn’t even attempt to use not having a game Tuesday — the scheduled game with Texas A&M was canceled due to COVID protocols — as a reason for his team’s lackluster overall play.
“It was their zone and zone press that got us out of sync,” Calipari said. “It was not taking days off. We had great practices. They went zone and we got confused.
“We do not have that guy who can take the ball and make things happen. When the point (guard) is shaky, then the rest is shaky. When you are playing against a zone normally teams pass, pass, pass. We were pass, hold, pass, bounce, point and come and screen. When we ran it up the court we were not bad. When we got in the half-court we held the ball.”
It was nothing new. It’s happened all season. Kentucky doesn’t have a go-to guy in a half-court offense if teams don’t give Mintz open 3-point looks. That’s why in most of UK’s 14 losses it has lost a second-half lead. It just cannot execute in the half-court.
Calipari closed his postgame press conference with a blunt, honest comment.
“Back to the drawing board,” the coach said.
The problem is and has been all season, that this team just cannot hit shots consistently or generate enough makeable shots in a half-court offense to win, and not sure what the coach can draw up the last week of the season to change that.
