BJ Boston and his UK teammates will likely see a zone defense against Ole Miss Tuesday. (SEC Photo)
John Calipari didn’t need to see any game film of Mississippi to know what the Rebels are going to do defensively against his team Tuesday night.
“I would imagine if Mississippi watches this—they play zone, anyway—they will probably play 40 minutes of zone,” Calipari said after Saturday’s loss to Florida. “We looked out of whack. No hard cuts.
“Normally, you guys that have listened to me, historically when a team plays zone, I like it because you have to pass the ball. They are in a zone. We didn’t pass it again. Whoever caught it, held it. ‘I’m making the play.’
“Okay. Now you’re going against—the ball moves, it’s posted. We don’t throw any skips that we had worked on for three days over the top. But give them credit. Florida did what they had to.”
All Florida had to do after giving up 26 points the first nine minutes was to go to a zone defense and that put the UK offense in neutral. It also helped force UK into double-digit turnovers again, an area the Cats have made a dramatic improvement in recent games.
“Probably because we got back to, ‘I’m going to make my play’ versus ‘I’m going to make a play for my teammate,'” Calipari said when asked about the turnovers.
“When you look at the numbers, what happened to us, you miss every shot, it’s hard to win, and we still had a chance. We were 1-for-11 in the second half from the three and I’m going to guess five of them were wide open and we missed them all.”
Calipari was disappointed with his team overall and said it was “really surprising” that sophomore Keion Brooks did not have anywhere close to a normal game. He was 1-for-5 from the field with four points, four rebounds, and three turnovers.
“I have no idea (what was wrong). I mean, he lost one ball and then did not sprint back and let them dunk a ball when the guy was three steps behind him when they both took off,” Calipari said.
“But I’m going to say this: I love him. He’s played great for us. They are not machines and they are not robots. He wasn’t very good today. But let’s see if the next game he comes back and he’s better next game.”
