UK held merely a 2-point lead, and the Cardinals had possession of the basketball, which meant a 3-pointer would win the game for Louisville — and wouldn’t that just be a heck of a way to end a day on which so much had gone right for the Kentucky team?
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So Calipari pondered what Rick Pitino might be manufacturing and designed his own counters. If Louisville screened or crossed, the Wildcats would switch. If Louisville tried a pick-and-roll, the Wildcats would trap it.
Afterward, Calipari was claiming the trap was a dumb idea. “The goofy coaches,” he said in a rare moment of self-deprecation. “Thank God they didn’t pick-and-roll because someone would have made a three and we’d have lost by one.”
The switch, though — that worked spectacularly. Louisville star Damion Lee, who stands 6-6, opened the possession being guarded by 5-9 Tyler Ulis. That’s a 9-inch height gap. What more could the Cardinals want? But they ran the play as called, which meant Cards center Chinanu Onuaku set a pin-down screen on Ulis as Lee darted up from the baseline toward the left wing. As Lee sprinted, 6-9 Alex Poythress, UK’s best athlete, picked him up. Lee’s rushed 3-pointer ended as an air ball, and Kentucky celebrated a 75-73 victory.
The best reasons Calipari owns an 8-1 advantage in his Kentucky-Louisville matchups against Pitino are playing in the NBA: John Wall, Anthony Davis, Willie-Cauley Stein. Even Cal will tell you this. The greatest difference between any two basketball coaches almost always is the difference between one coach’s talent and the other’s.
This is not the exclusive difference, though. The squandering of superior talent is not without precedent at any level of the game, particularly in college, where rosters must be built and rebuilt rapidly and chemistry must be conjured almost daily.
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The best work Calipari did in regards to UK’s game against Louisville came in advance. The Wildcats had become a perfunctory sort of team, as he saw it, expecting success perhaps because of their draft ratings or their preseason All-American honors or the brand they represent. Ohio State and UCLA both had stumbled into their meetings with Kentucky, and Kentucky seemed to anticipate more stumbling. Instead, the Wildcats were clocked twice.
“Part of our issue is, we needed enthusiasm,” Calipari said. “I demanded it. It’s kind of like we’re saying, ‘We’re throwing you a life raft, but you’ve got to swim.’ You’ve got to swim. All you guys on the boat that threw the life raft, you’ve got to say, “SWIM! Come on, baby, you can do it, there’s a shark behind you, SWIM!’
“Or you can sit on the boat and look around at each other and say, ‘You see that shark behind him? Shark’s going to get his leg. You watch.’ The enthusiasm that we need for each other — enthusiasm matters, fight matters. Obviously you’ve got to have a skilled team and good players, and I think we do.”
Kentucky also was doing a miserable job executing against zone offense over the first 10 games. Having worked on that for a week fully expecting a 2-3 matchup scheme from Louisville, the Cats were effective enough to build a 52-36 lead inside the first 3 minutes of the second half. They shot 46.2 percent from the floor for the game, including 11-of-23 on 3-pointers.
Eventually their execution against Louisville’s matchup withered, but they shot confidently enough when stranded above the foul line and racing the melting shot-clock to hit twice from distance in the final 5 minutes. Average time-to-shoot on those: 4.5 seconds.
“Courage,” Calipari said. “I’ve said that to all these guys. I said, ‘The guys who make game-winners or make big plays that are like the knife in the — they’re not afraid to miss that shot.’ The guy that’s afraid to miss it will ball-fake it and take a tough one. ‘I was trying to draw a foul.’ No, you weren’t. You did not want to take the open shot.”
Calipari built his path toward the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame primarily with an uncommon understanding of how to get players to play together, to play well and to play well together. Some have doubted, dismissed or derided his ability to strategize, even though he has coached nearly three decades and only in the past seven seasons — since arriving at Kentucky — has enjoyed the luxury of rosters deep in high-end NBA prospects.
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On Saturday, though, his full array of talents as a college coach were apparent. He was the recruiter who pursued Ulis when talent scouts were ranking him outside the top 40 prospects; Ulis produced 21 points and 8 assists. Calipari was the psychologist who chased the Wildcats out of whatever funk might have seemed likely after they’d mostly stunk last Saturday against Ohio State.
And he was the coach who put Ulis into a last-second defensive assignment he almost certainly would struggle to fulfill. Calipari dared Louisville to change its play call on the fly or cope with the consequences. The Cards chose not to audible. Was that how Calipari figured it would go? He never said. He didn’t need to.
