We knew Kentucky vs. Alabama would be a track meet, but without Lamont Butler and Jaxson Robinson, the Cats just couldn’t keep up. After the 96-83 loss, Mark Pope admitted that fatigue factored into Kentucky’s performance down the stretch.
“The game got a little helter-skelter,” Pope said during his postgame press conference. “We got a little fatigued. We had some protection issues. We had some defensive coverage issues.”
Kentucky had fewer turnovers than Alabama, 13-15, but the Crimson Tide made the Cats pay for their mistakes, turning those turnovers into 24 points. They punished the Cats in transition with 23 fastbreak points. Pope said Alabama’s use of “Barkleys,” a move named after Charles Barkley in which a player turns a drive into a post-up, also stymied his squad.
“We got killed with Barkleys today,” he said during his conversation with Tom Leach. “That was really, really disappointing, just really incredibly disappointing, and we just were trying to address it throughout the game, and we couldn’t manage to communicate an answer to our guys that was executable. So that was super frustrating for the entirety of the game.
“And then just these scattered stretches of the game where we just had some fatigue, full-on disorientation, where we just either didn’t have the bodies or the experience or the communication to kind of manage them. So there’s a lot, I mean, there’s a lot of just the things that we can do better.”
When Kentucky lost Lamont Butler in the Tennessee game, Pope dubbed it a new season. So far, the Cats are 1-2. With just four games left before the SEC Tournament, you could hear the urgency in Pope’s voice as he talked about how his team needs to improve before it’s too late.
“We’ve got to get better. We’re in a new season, we’re three games in. We’ve got to get better. We’ve got to get better fast. We’ve got guys that have got to grow up fast. We’ve got guys that have got to survive through this tough stretch and dig deeper into the well, and we can. Like, we’ve been getting better. We weren’t good enough to do this tonight on the road, but we are getting better.”
