(Photo by Brett Carlsen / Getty Images)
The Greatest Tradition In College Basketball ™ has been eliminated from its own event, the SEC Tournament, before the sun set on Thursday’s games list in Nashville. The Gold Standard ™ will return home to Lexington before the first four leagues of the tournament – Alabama, Arkansas, LSU and Tennessee – play their first matches of the tournament.
An unfathomable situation before the season begins “the only coronavirus can stop us” is a reality after your wildcats at the University of Kentucky lost to Mississippi State, the No. 9 tournament, in Thursday’s game. the first session of the first SEC fun day. I can’t even believe he’s writing these words for Big Blue Nation to say: Your wildcats from the University of Kentucky lost to Mississippi State, No. 9 in the tournament, in Thursday’s game at noon.
“We were punctured,” John Calipari later said at his post-game press conference after the 73-74 defeat. His most true statement of the year, Kentucky was punk and unfortunately will be the lasting memory of one of the worst seasons in the show’s history. The 2020-21 ends with just nine wins, no hope of the NCAA tournament and a loss to a 14-13 team from Starkville, Mississippi.
It sucks. There is no way to cover it with sugar. There’s also no way out of writing the edition of this game from the 10 Takeaways, so we end this recap so we can get past what would best be an anomaly of a basketball season.
1. The state of Mississippi completely manipulated Kentucky inland.
One team showed up for a fight, the other showed up to push, and from the start, it was very clear that Kentucky was in trouble. Things were so bad at the start of the game that Mississippi State, the team that showed up to fight, had a 14-rebound lead at halftime. Half time!
John Calipari said: “There were more than 15 rebounds. Are you kidding me? I’ve never seen it. Maybe Division I vs. Division III, but I’ve never seen any 15. Are you going to go down 30 rebounds? Will they bounce you from 15 to 20? I’ve never heard of such a thing. “
It was better in the second half when Kentucky tried to recoup their reverse investment, but the Bulldogs won the cup in the end by a staggering 46-30 margin.
“When you talk about how they scored, they probably scored seven, eight baskets with offensive rebounds, where we couldn’t get to have balls.”
Lance Ware was an important part of the problem. The first year of the reserve was forced to increase significantly in minutes due to two fouls in the first half by both Olivier Sarr and Isaiah Jackson, and was mistreated in apparently all possessions. To be fair, Sarr and Jackson weren’t much better when they were there, but the Ware experiment didn’t work at all.
2. The top scorer in the United Kingdom added zero points.
Kentucky didn’t have a top scorer all season, but the team’s top scorer, BJ Boston, has scored at least 12 points per game to give a bit of a blow to each game’s scoring column.
Boston scored zero in the SEC tournament defeat. A former lottery player coming out of high school in the eyes of draft analysts, Boston went 0-4 from the field and played just 23 minutes into the game, perhaps the last as a wildcat.
Or maybe not the last? His post-season NBA audition in a game will only further hurt his actions. We’ll talk about it again. Right now, all that matters is your goose egg in a must play game.
3. Devin Askew offered nothing again.
Askew’s statistical line includes zero points, one shot attempt, no free throw attempt, no assist, no fouls, no losses or blockages, just a steal thrown directly into the hands and a rebound. These are the numbers you see when you play two minutes at the end of a game, not on the team’s ONE POINT GUARD in 21 minutes of tournament basketball. Still, he still found his way into the game once Kentucky returned to play in the second half. More on that in a moment.
4. This equipment cannot score from three feet.
A problem throughout the season, Kentucky struggled again to complete the simple task of placing the ball over the edge when shooting directly below or around the basket. In this one, the Cats finished 6 against 15 in the throws and lost one of the two tries, and all of the team are guilty.
5. This person, whoever he is, deserved better.
6. This game further showed that John Calipari was clueless with this list, the list he built.
Jacob Toppin started and played seven minutes with no foul problems. Devin Askew, known for not being playable at the end of games, registered at the end of the game; coincidentally, the United Kingdom struggled to score at the end of the match. Terrence Clarke hasn’t played since December, so we’re sure to throw him out as soon as possible because, again, the replacement patterns seem to have been pulled out of a hat and he’s been that way all year.
We can’t expect Calipari to have all the answers when his players aren’t clearly of the caliber he’s used to, but some obvious adjustments haven’t been made today and in many games all season.
7. The final four minutes played again.
Davion Mintz hit a 3-point lead to put Kentucky at five with four and a half minutes to go, completing a miraculous and exciting second-half comeback when it looked like the season was dead. But that four-minute mark came on the clock, the Grim Reaper for that year-round Kentucky team, and they scored just once more before losing by one in the end. Mississippi State’s Iverson Molinar scored eight points in that period.
How many times have we written the same story this year? Don’t answer that. We know it was a lot.
The last play was very good. It was all you could ask for, especially after seeing some of the ways they caused the last possessions in the regular season.
8. The UK shot 58% from the free throw line as a team.
Do you want to lose? Fight to hit half the pounds. Kentucky received 17 free looks from the line and lost seven.
9. Davion Mintz did everything he could to bring Kentucky back.
While the three five-star Kentucky freshmen joined by two points, the Kentucky transfer from Creighton tried to put the team on its back as it has done many times before. Mintz got four triples and got eight assists with zero changes and a couple of big rebounds when his teammates didn’t bounce, but the help was from no one.
Any other except …
10. Dontaie Allen.
Everyone stands up and applauds Dontaie Allen for coming out again against the state of Mississippi. If it weren’t for Allen’s six-point six, Kentucky doesn’t even have a shot at the bottom of the stretch. He and Mintz kept Kentucky alive with outside shooting, and fans can’t help but wonder what it might have been like if Allen had had more chances earlier in the year.
Do you have many weaknesses? Yes. Did he play poorly in his limited action in several games? Definitely. But Dontaie Allen played 30 minutes just twice all year and scored 23 points both times. BJ Boston (who I think could have played well with Allen) averaged 30 minutes per game and never scored 23 points in a game all season. Devin Askew averaged 30 minutes per game and never scored 15. You will never convince me that giving Allen some of his minutes (only some minutes) was not the best for everyone. But every time Allen gave up two points or let an open eye pass, we heard about it at a press conference as if he was the only one making mistakes. The whole team made mistakes. Everyone had deficiencies throughout the year.
Other players on the team were given opportunity after opportunity when they also gave up baskets or missed shots or played losing basketball. If Allen had been given a little more opportunities to pick up a pace and play with some of his shortcomings, many of which he has, I think the season would have been a little better (not great), but better of what it was) and the fan base wouldn’t be so upset by the obvious favoritism against one of ours.
Maybe I’m an idiot and wouldn’t have improved at all, but is it worse what we saw game after game after game of a team of nine wins? He had the two most thrashed games on the back court all year and played the group’s minimum minutes.
It is only fitting that the season should end with his departure to prove that he deserved more. I guess we’ll never know what he could have become if he hadn’t been valued for the potential of other players that never materialized.
I didn’t want to end this with a Dontaie Allen bastard, but here it is.
Now we’re going to enjoy life out of the stress of this season and losing to Kentucky against Mississippi State, the No. 9 pick in the tournament, in Thursday’s noon game of the SEC tournament.