CHICAGO — When he was at Iowa State, Milan Momcilovic made 3-pointers from all sorts of odd angles in his three meetings with the Kansas basketball team, but perhaps even more important was that he simply had the chance to attempt a lot of them.
The sharpshooter from Wisconsin fired 20 times from beyond the arc across those three games, which actually isn’t much higher than his career per-game average.
“He can score 12 points in a minute-and-a-half span — at least we saw it in Hilton Coliseum more than once,” KU coach Bill Self said.
When KU faced Momcilovic again on Tuesday, this time with him sporting the blue and white of the Kentucky Wildcats, the goal was less to hinder his accuracy than to prevent him from getting the ball up in the first place.
“What we told our guys was it wasn’t numbers — because you can play good defense, he gets off six, that can still be 18 points or 15 points — our deal was numbers of 3s he attempted,” Self said. “And so that number being three tonight, that was about as good as I could hope for, because I set our goal at four tonight.”
Indeed, the Jayhawks delivered by holding Momcilovic to three shots from beyond the arc, just one of which he made (from the right corner in the second half). It equaled his lowest number of attempts from beyond the arc since Jan. 11, 2025.
In all, he scored five points with seven rebounds on 2-for-7 shooting as KU beat Kentucky 89-69.
“Our deal was to have no close-outs with him, to be there on the catch where you’re not actually running at him to try to take away his shot, where it’s taken away before he actually caught the ball,” Self said. “And then our switches were pretty good.”
KU’s veteran wing Tre White did much of the defending on the 6-foot-9 Momcilovic. But 6-foot-1 guard Leroy Blyden Jr., among others, chipped in frequently despite his height disadvantage.
“It’s not easy,” White said. “You know, he’s running off so many actions, but I think it’s not a one-man job. I think it’s a whole-team defense. We got somebody bluffing at him, we got somebody helping off the back cuts. It’s a full (team) job. I just feel like we did a good job tonight making him shoot tough 2s and tough 3s for sure. He’s a great shooter, though.”
In large part due to this group effort, the 3-pointer was not much of a factor for the Wildcats overall. Kentucky finished 4-for-21 from beyond the arc, with its other three coming from guard Zoom Diallo, who was by far its most consistent offensive player on the night.
“Give a lot of credit to Kansas’ scheme, how they approached the game defensively,” Kentucky coach Mark Pope said. “Their switching was problematic and bothersome for us, and they did a nice job on (Momcilovic).”
TOIL AND TROUBLE
Part of why Diallo had to carry so much of the load was the conspicuous absence of two Kentucky 7-footers for much of the first half. Center Malachi Moreno committed one foul 16 seconds into the game and another three minutes later. Meanwhile, due to a bizarre sequence that included a technical and offensive foul, his 7-foot frontcourt mate Ousmane N’Diaye got whistled for three fouls in 21 seconds.
“In the first three and a half minutes, four minutes, we lost our whole frontcourt, and that was problematic for us,” Pope said. “We didn’t respond to that very well, both from a coaching-staff perspective and from a player perspective, and then it just seemed like distraction after distraction after that.”
It all meant a lot of time on the court for Franck Kepnang and Justin McBride, and very little, particularly in the first half (11 combined minutes) for the Wildcats’ starters.
“Me and Tre talked about that a lot,” freshman forward Tyran Stokes said. “Like if we’re going to come out, we know there’s bigger bigs, we’re going to try to punch it down their throat to get them in early foul trouble.”
The importance of getting Moreno out of the game became retrospectively clear later on. He scored 17 points and grabbed eight rebounds in the second half alone and really gave KU’s veteran forward Trey Kaufman-Renn problems at times late, albeit with the game already out of hand. He only left the floor for 16 seconds in the second half.
“I told TKR if we could play without Malachi on the floor it’d be much easier because he’s dynamic, he could pass, he could sometimes step back and shoot, so us getting them in foul trouble was just a lot easier for us to get downhill and attack,” Stokes said.
Kaufman-Renn said he was impressed by what he saw from Moreno.
“He’s a really good player, he’s a lot better than what I saw on film,” Kaufman-Renn said. “So hats off to him, he had a hell of a game. But definitely getting him in foul trouble early really helped us out.”
N’Diaye was never as much of a factor. He finished with four points and two rebounds. Kepnang and McBride combined for one point and three rebounds.
