When Lance Ware grabbed an offensive rebound and fed Davion Mintz for a 3-pointer, Kentucky had a 71-66 lead over Mississippi State with 4:28 remaining in Thursday’s SEC Tournament matchup. It looked like the Cats were going to overcome a disastrous first half where they fell behind by 14 points and manage to advance. Then — like it has most of the season — UK’s offense stalled.
Olivier Sarr missed a jumper. Keion Brooks was called for an offensive foul. Sarr did score with a nifty move with 1:13 left to put UK back on top 73-72 but then Sarr missed an almost desperation 3-pointer with the shot clock running out. Finally, Dontaie Allen’s 3-pointer before the buzzer missed and UK turned another very likely win into a season-ending 74-73 loss.
So what happened to an offense that scored 41 points in 15 1/2 minutes, including 20 by Allen, in the last 4 1/2minutes of such a winnable game?
“Coach’s plan towards that last four minutes was kind of feed it to the post. We were running circles. Either taking open shots, if it wasn’t wide open we feed into the post,” Mintz, who had 16 points on 6-for-10 shooting, said.
“We just kind of got a little stagnant, very slow. Just didn’t get good looks at what we wanted.”
Little stagnant? Very slow? Not exactly how you would think a team would be playing late in its 25th game of the season. Compare that to how Mintz said Mississippi State played. The Bulldogs last eight points came from Iverson Molinar, a former player on the Grind Session.
“They were coming off of staggers over the top, making shots. I mean, they hit a lot of daggers towards the end,” Mintz said. “We couldn’t capitalize and answer back, especially when we had the lead towards the last four minutes.”
Mintz didn’t make excuses. He didn’t blame COVID, the pre-conference schedule or bad luck. He just admitted UK didn’t make plays to win.”
“Like Coach said, we got to fight. We got to have winning plays. We just didn’t have enough. It came to bite us towards the end,” Mintz said.
“I just felt like they wanted it more than us the last couple minutes. They were executing exactly what their coach had for them.”
Bingo! Mintz put it perfectly.
But how could Mississippi State want the game more than a nine-win Kentucky team that had its worst season in a 100 years? Shouldn’t there have been more urgency from UK?
Execution? Kentucky couldn’t do that to close out any close game this year and that’s why UK lost 15 games and why this team had so much trouble figuring that out is something Calipari could never figure out.
