3/1/09
Rick Bozich in the Courier Journal...
Kentucky lost a game it should have won, and needed to win, against Louisiana State 73-70 in Rupp Arena yesterday. UK coach Billy Gillispie said the loss was 100 percent his responsibility.
Then Gillispie devoted nearly 110 percent of his time sounding like a coach convinced this is a player problem, not a coach problem. He said his players were exasperating. He said they were not smart, botching his instructions to switch defenders on Tasmin Mitchell's game-winning three-pointer. He said they were not tough. He said they didn't listen. He said he didn't understand why they didn't listen.
Most of all, Gillispie talked repeatedly about one player that he refused to identify who cost Kentucky the victory with his play.
"I made a real, real, real bad substitution (for an injured Ramon Harris in the second half)," Gillispie said. "If I don't substitute, we win."
I'm not going to speculate about the player's identity because instead of agreeing with Gillispie, I'm 100 percent in agreement with his sophomore center, Patrick Patterson.
"It's never one person's fault," Patterson said. "There are a lot of plays in any game. You win as a team and you lose as a team."
It's alarming when a team's 19-year-old center is handling the adversity of this choppy UK season with more poise than the team's 49-year-old coach. But as UK continues to slide from NCAA Tournament consideration, discord has become the trademark of this slumping team.
Gillispie's harsh words yesterday followed his postgame radio rant at South Carolina, when he made a point of trashing Perry Stevenson, Josh Harrellson and A.J. Stewart after he was asked a question about Jodie Meeks.
It's alarming when a team's 19-year-old center is handling the adversity of this choppy UK season with more poise than the team's 49-year-old coach. But as UK continues to slide from NCAA Tournament consideration, discord has become the trademark of this slumping team.
Gillispie's harsh words yesterday followed his postgame radio rant at South Carolina, when he made a point of trashing Perry Stevenson, Josh Harrellson and A.J. Stewart after he was asked a question about Jodie Meeks.
It's continuous dysfunction. Maybe it explains why Kentucky has lost six of its past nine, sits 8-6 in the SEC and 19-10 overall and likely has to win its final two regular-season games against Georgia (here Wednesday) and Florida (there Saturday) to avoid having to win the SEC Tournament to secure an invitation to the tournament that matters.
From the Louisville Eccentric Observer's C. D. Kaplan...
“My Bad. It’s Your Fault”
Okay, shame on me. That is not Billy Clyde’s exact quote when explaining UK’s tough loss to LSU yesterday. What he actually said was this:
“It’s all on me. It’s 100% on me. It always is, but more so even than 100%. If I don’t play a guy in the second half, we win.”
Subtitles: “That dang (Choose one: Liggins, Harrellson, Galloway, Stevenson, Stewart, Porter, Harris, Krebs) cost us the game.”
Now that’s pinpointing the problem, coach.
If Billy Clyde said it once, he repeated it twenty times in his post game presser with Tom Leach: “I don’t understand.”
Well BCG, here’s what I don’t understand. Your team took 52 shots (hit a danged good percentage too), and two guys — Patterson and Meeks — took 39 of them. How come the other guys don’t get the ball in places where it’s okay for them to shoot? If you don’t want Stevenson to shoot from the elbow, why don’t you have somebody who can get it in that spot when you’re team is swinging the ball from side to side? If only to loosen up the stranglehold that your two big uns have to deal with. Jodie Meeks firing contested treys ain’t gonna cut it. That Tennessee game was an aberration.
Miller can shoot. Galloway seems to have a shot. Give em a chance. Make em feel like it’s okay for them to fire it up. Otherwise their knees are going to keep shaking. As it now stands, UK’s streak of 17 straight NCAAs is in serious jeopardy.
From the Herald Leader's John Clay...
Bottom line, two teams going in opposite directions.
LSU is the best basketball team in the SEC. Saturday made it official. The Tigers won their 13th straight league game by beating UK 73-70 in Rupp Arena when Trent Johnson's veteran club scaled a 10-point second-half deficit and Tasmin Mitchell bagged the game's biggest shot with 9.8 seconds left.
Kentucky, well, it's the team that squandered that 56-46 advantage with 9:51 remaining.
Kentucky is the team that didn't switch as instructed on Mitchell's game-winning dagger and got off a contested Jodie Meeks' airball at the other end with less than two seconds left.
Kentucky is the team that is now 8-6 in the SEC, that has lost six of its last nine.
Real question: Does that make Kentucky an NCAA Tournament team?
Answer: Not right now.
Kentucky is now 19-10 overall and 8-6 in the SEC. A win over Georgia on Wednesday won't be enough to impress the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee. UK's post-season fate will be decided in the Sunshine State. First there's the regular-season finale against Florida in Gainesville. Then there's the SEC Tournament in Tampa.
From the New York Times' Pete Thamel
That’s because Kentucky lost a game to L.S.U. that it could have won yesterday. The Wildcats are clinging to their N.C.A.A. lives and struggling in an downright miserable S.E.C.
So how are the locals handling it? Just ask Kentucky’s Secretary of State, Trey Grayson. This is an actual entry from his twitter account. The entry reads: “Maybe AJ Stewart should consider quitting again if he is going to leave his man wide open for a game winning shot.” Stewart is the Wildcat sophomore who briefly quit the team after playing just three minutes in a blowout loss to South Carolina earlier this week.
The best part of all this? Grayson’s pointed analysis is wrong. It was Kevin Galloway who admitted he botched the defensive assignment on a high pick-and-roll at the end of the game, not Stewart. The Cats were supposed to switch everything. Galloway didn’t switch.
And so what happens to a high ranking government official who wrongly rips a college sophomore on his Twitter account? Grayson, of course, is a considering a run for the U.S. Senate.