No. 5 Kentucky staved off an upset bid and beat No. 12 Davidson in a first-round game at the NCAA tournament on Thursday in Boise, 78-73. Kentucky will play No. 4 Arizona or No. 13 Buffalo in a second-round game on Saturday, with a Sweet 16 trip in the balance.
Here’s why these Kentucky fans are angry about their NCAA tournament win
UK won, but a cool streak ended.
Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports
Davidson gave UK lots of trouble. But in the end, Kentucky prevailed by sticking to its identity in an even more extreme fashion than usual. John Calipari’s game plan worked.
Sadly, Kentucky didn’t make a three-point shot in the course of winning this game. It was the first time in 1,047 games that UK didn’t make a three, a streak that ran back to 1988.
Kentucky fans are not happy about the end of this streak.
There are at least dozens of these types of messages floating around Twitter on Thursday night, but let’s take a light sampling of the response:
Let’s check in with the players.
Oh.
Anyway, Kentucky’s approach to this game put the streak in danger.
Calipari’s approach to this game wasn’t complicated. Kentucky always has more talent than whoever it’s playing, but the athletic disparity between UK and an Atlantic-10 opponent like Davidson is massive. Calipari knew this, and he decided he’d rather play this game around the basket. Maybe Davidson’s defensive looks helped him decide that, or maybe not.
Kentucky didn’t make a three. It tried six three-pointers, so it’s not that weird that UK didn’t make one, but still: Six attempts! In 40 minutes! Kentucky becomes just the fourth team since 2011 and first since 2014 to win a tournament game without connecting on a single triple, according to College Basketball Reference. They basically played like it was 1932.
That fits well enough with Kentucky’s usual strategy and strengths.
Kentucky is hyper-athletic, as it always is after Calipari hauls in a class full of five-star recruits. But they’re pretty mediocre at shooting, entering the night with the country’s No. 142 effective field goal percentage. They were at 36 percent from three for the year, and they scored just 21 percent of their points on them — a stunningly low number, 340th out of 351 teams. (Just 26 percent of their total field goal tries are threes. That’s 344th.)
UK really only has three guys — Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Quade Green, and Kevin Knox — who are even remotely good at shooting three-pointers. It stands to reason that Davidson would’ve been more worried about getting torched by Kentucky’s size near the hoop. But Kentucky never wanted to settle for threes, and it almost never did on Thursday.
To go with its 0-for-6 effort on threes, UK shot 26-for-45 on twos. That was plenty good enough, because Davidson couldn’t do better than 39 percent from the field.
For Kentucky, this was an impressive win. Davidson was legit.
In 2008, Stephen Curry led that program on a Cinderella run to the Elite Eight. That team was a No. 10 seed, though it played better than that both in the regular season and the tournament. That team’s strengths were similar to this year’s, though the ‘08 team was better for most of the year. (This year’s came on strong at the end and wouldn’t have had a prayer at a tournament bid if not for winning the Atlantic 10 tournament.)
Headlined by Curry, the ‘08 team had some good shooting numbers. This year’s team actually has better shooting numbers, but it plays similarly. Then-coach Bob McKillop is still the coach, and his system still emphasizes avoiding turnovers and passing fluidly to set up open shots. Davidson entered Saturday with the country’s ninth-best effective shooting percentage, seventh-best offensive turnover rate, and 11th-best assists-to-field goals rank.
The “fundamentally sound” label tends to get slapped on mid-majors with talent disadvantages who punch above their weight in the turnover. At Davidson, it’s legit. McKillop’s team is this good because its players work well together and commit few unforced errors. They didn’t on Thursday, either, and Kentucky had to work for all it got.
UK’s next opponent is likely Arizona. That will mean a different game plan.
The Wildcats have DeAndre Ayton, the most dominant big man in college basketball right now, hanging around near the win. Ayton’s the crown jewel of a roster full of former blue-chip recruits who can come closer than almost anyone to matching Kentucky’s skill.
How Calipari calibrates his strategy for that game will say a lot about his own adaptability. Whatever he does will require Kentucky to make more outside jumpers. But his team deserves credit for picking a way forward against Davidson and sticking relentlessly to it.
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