Davion Mintz and his teammates were excited before the Senior Day loss to Florida. Now they have two games this week where win or lose, they still have to win the SEC tourney to make the NCAA. (SEC Photo)
Kentucky plays at Mississippi tonight and hosts South Carolina Saturday and one might wonder about the Cats’ motivation. Lose both games and UK has to win the SEC Tournament to make the NCAA Tournament. Win both games and UK still has to win the SEC Tournament to get into NCAA play because of its 8-14 record.
Kentucky assistant coach Jai Lucas said Monday he didn’t think motivation would be an issue for Kentucky this week.
“They have pretty good motivation right now. They haven’t folded. They haven’t stopped working or anything like that, so that’s been the one positive with like you were saying, how the season has gone,” said Lucas.
“I think they still understand what we have ahead of us. We take it one game at a time and then we’ll just focus, once we get to the SEC Tournament, one game at a time there, and see what happens.”
Why didn’t the coaches maybe emphasize more before the Florida loss about winning out to get a double-bye in the SEC Tournament?
“Well, the main thing is just trying to win every game and get to each game. And a lot of it with the double-bye, you have to account for what the other teams do and how they play and stuff like that,” Lucas said.
“When you talk about it, it’s kind of a 50-50 thing. As long as we can take care and control what we can control, it will take care of ourselves. That was the biggest thing was just getting them to focus on Ole Miss.”
Kentucky coach John Calipari didn’t think having last week’s game with Texas A&M canceled due to COVID impacted the Cats in their loss to Florida. Lucas had a bit different take on the team having a full week off after winning its third straight game.
“In retrospect, you can say that (not playing hurt UK). And that’s part of the year. That’s part of the COVID season. We had a little rhythm going and you want to do everything to keep it going. That pause and that break, you kind of saw what some of the other teams coming out of the break, like a Baylor at Kansas, (how that affected them),” Lucas said.
“When you don’t have a rhythm and something happens -– and it can be one game like the Texas A&M thing -– it just throws you off, out of sync, especially for a team like ours who have kind of been up and down all year. When you find something and you have a little momentum, you kind of want to do everything to keep it going.”
Lucas said it was hard to tell if UK reverting to old habits against Florida was more mental or physical. However, he did seem to agree with my feeling on WLAP Sunday Morning Sports that some UK players did not handle the prosperity of even a three-game win streak very well.
“It’s hard to say because you can say it can come from us not playing and then there just being this gap of. You don’t know what kind of hangover you’re going to have from being off that long,” Lucas said.
“I think that’s a big part of it. And then we were coming off something that we hadn’t had all year if I’m correct, a three-game win streak -– the second time (this season) -– you just don’t know what type of stuff they’re getting and reading and stuff like that. So it’s a little bit of everything.”
