Thoughts on Yale win and Kentucky's offense
The Cats pulled out a win but showed some warts. Plus, I peel back the layers on the data around Kentucky's offense.
There’s a saying, “good teams win but great teams cover”. If that’s the case, Kentucky was a good team but not a great one on Saturday. They beat Yale by 10, after looking at times like they might overwhelm the Bulldogs; the Wildcats were favored by 16. As Tony said in the immortal film Blue Chips: “Man, don’t nobody care about the spread but some damn gamblers.” A win is a win, but one of my favorite elements of basketball (and any sport) is that you don’t just play the team in front of you. You also play against the invisible standard of yourself. Did you play up to your best? Did you push yourself to improve, so you are better in those moments where it makes the difference between winning and losing?
Kentucky didn’t do that on Sunday. The Wildcats had an atrocious effort in defensive rebounding, and they were well below their usual standard in transition. Both of these were driven by how Yale prepared and executed a game plan, but it’s got to be concerning to the coaching staff and fan base that UK can be neutralized in a couple key areas. This game reminded me of Notre Dame last season, where the Irish had a game plan to take away transition shots and frustrate UK in a halfcourt game. It worked that day for Notre Dame, and it kept Yale in this game despite turnover issues. In both games, Oscar Tshiebwe went nuts (28 points on 18 shots vs Yale, 25 on 14 vs Notre Dame) with no other Wildcat in either game topping 12 points. UK hit 4 of 15 shots in transition vs Yale and 2 of 11 vs Notre Dame.
Both of these games exposed the fact that, without transition scoring, Kentucky’s entire offensive game plan was basically Oscar Tshiebwe. Last season, Kentucky made some offensive adjustments after that game…I wrote about that last season and recently noted that UK should look to make similar adjustments this season. I’ve learned to take any public comments by John Calipari with a grain of salt (see: Oscar will shoot threes, UK is practicing zone, etc), but some comments he made after the Yale game are a little concerning in how he’s presenting data on UK’s offense. So, I spent some time doing a thorough review of UK’s halfcourt offense to try to understand and evaluate 1) how it’s doing and 2) what might be going wrong. I’ll dig into that below, for premium subscribers….
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