Nick KrugIndianapolis ? When trying to figure out why Larry Brown said what he said about Kentucky going undefeated, so many possibilities came to mind.
Not once did it occur to me that he might have said it because he meant every word of it. He’s been around long enough not to care about what anybody thinks about anything he says. He thought it. He said it. He meant it. Simple as that.
After watching Kentucky peer down at Kansas all night, it’s impossible to paint Brown’s words as hyperbolic, and who has greater credibility than the only man to win both an NCAA Tournament championship and an NBA title?
Nobody.
No team has run the college basketball table since Bob Knight’s 1976 Indiana team. A streak of 38 years is tough to bet against, but Kentucky is so huge, so filled with skilled interior passers, so unselfish, and did we already mention huge? Yes. Well, it deserves another mention. And another and another and another. It deserves platoons of mentions.
Kentucky coach John Calipari’s strategy of substituting five men at a time wasn’t the issue in the Wildcats’ 72-40 domination of the Jayhawks.
It was who those men were, particularly the first five.
Kentucky starts a pair of 6-foot-6, tournament-tested sophomore guards, twins Aaron and Andrew Harrison and rounds out the NBA-sized lineup with 6-8 Alex Poythress, 6-11 Karl Anthony-Towns and 7-footer Willie Cauley-Stein. The second unit features a back line of players measuring 6-9, 6-9, 6-10 and a 6-6 shooting guard.
“We were good today,” Kentucky coach John Calipari said. “What we did was we defended. That makes your offense a lot easier.”
His team defended all right. It blocked 11 shots and limited Kansas to 13 percent shooting in the second half, 19.6 percent overall.
Kansas guards would drive into the lane and quickly were lost in the forest, no light in sight.
One of UK’s trees would stand with his arms raised straight in the air, giving another tall teammate the chance to come from behind to swat any shot.
At the other end, the Kentucky big men were no less impressive, so perfectly timing their interior passes to set up another tall teammate.
“Is it crazy to think that?” KU coach Bill Self echoed a question of the possibility of Kentucky going undefeated. “I don’t think it’s crazy to think that. I don’t know if I’d base everything on this one game. They’re going to go somewhere and run into somebody who’s going to play great. I don’t know if now is the time to talk about it. If by February they’re still undefeated …”
What will it take to beat them?
“Somebody’s going to have to play a great game to beat them, there’s no question about that,” Self said. “And it’s going to have to be when Kentucky’s on the road.”
Andrew Harrison ran the show so well for the Wildcats (3-0) and the big men were so good with the ball that Kentucky had just six turnovers.
For Kansas, Jamari Traylor did his best to get in the way of much bigger scorers and was able to block three shots. Perry Ellis wasn’t able to make them notice he was guarding them. They overpowered him.
“There’s a chance,” Self said, “they may have 10 guys who play in the league in their platoon deal.”
Self went back to the question of whether Kentucky could run the table.
“Right now, they’re so much ahead of probably where other people are,” Self said. “I don’t know about Arizona, but us certainly. Teams do get better throughout the course of the year. His team will continue to get better too.”
How much better can Kentucky get?
“We’ve got a long way to go offensively, figuring out how we get more motion,” Calipari said. “Today we just tried to jam it in. We’re going to have teams zone us and sag. They’re not going to stretch out like Kansas did. They’re going to go zone, and they’re going to trap the post and force us to shoot jumpers.”
Trap the post? So that the excellent-passing big men can dump passes off for easy buckets? A prescription for disaster.
Three games into Kentucky’s season isn’t too soon to say it. This team could run the table.
