In a season that’s tested patience, exposed flaws, and delivered more frustration than celebration, Kentucky basketball fans have been searching for something — anything — to believe in. The wins haven’t always come easy. The losses have stung. But quietly, almost stubbornly, one development has begun to rise above the noise. It didn’t arrive with fireworks or headlines. It’s grown possession by possession, rebound by rebound. And now the question isn’t whether Kentucky has found a bright spot — it’s whether that spark is becoming something much bigger than anyone expected..
Malachi Moreno knew exactly what he was going to be in for Saturday afternoon, and his post battles with the formidable Florida Gators’ frontcourt lived up to the billing.
“They’ve got a lot of size on the inside. So it was definitely a battle down there,” Moreno said after Kentucky’s 92-83 loss in the O’Connell Center. “So I knew I had to prepare myself, and I think I came in with the right mentality. But, I mean, we lost the rebounding battle. So that’s unacceptable.”
If outrebounding Florida is the measure of success, then there’s been a whole lot of failure around college basketball these past few months.
The Gators have outrebounded their past 24 opponents. In fact, they’ve outrebounded every team they’ve played except for Arizona, which beat Florida 38-36 on the boards in the season opener Nov. 3. Arizona had been the No. 1 team in the country for the past nine weeks going into Monday.
Kentucky lost the board battle 45-37 on Saturday, but that minus-8 margin put up by the Cats was the closest any team had gotten to coach Todd Golden’s squad since it outrebounded Missouri by just two in the SEC opener six weeks ago.
Before facing UK, the Gators led the country with a plus-14.8 rebounding margin. And if anyone is upset the Cats didn’t do better on the boards Saturday, they need not point fingers at Moreno.
The freshman center from Georgetown was a force in the middle all day long.
While some of Kentucky’s other bigs didn’t come close to matching Florida’s physicality, Moreno spent all afternoon battling what is arguably the best frontline in the country.
Afterward, Golden said he thought UK “won the boards” in the first half despite the Gators making that a big part of their game plan going in. “It was a concern of ours to make sure we kept them off the glass,” he said. “And they got us early.”
Officially, Kentucky and Florida played to a stalemate on the glass in the first half, each team grabbing 20 rebounds. But for Golden and the Gators — a bunch accustomed to asserting their will on the boards — what happened in the early going Saturday must’ve felt like a loss.
Moreno had more to do with that than anyone.
He outfought Rueben Chinyelu — the top rebounder in college basketball — for his first defensive board of the game. On the ensuing possession, Moreno engaged both Chinyelu and Alex Condon — nearly 14 feet and 501 pounds of combined Gator — and didn’t let up, forcing a jump ball and earning an offensive rebound as the possession stayed with Kentucky.
He grabbed another offensive board over Chinyelu right after that.
It was more of the same for as long as Moreno was on the court. He finished with 11 points and 11 rebounds, though he spent nearly as much time watching as he did playing.
“Malachi had a terrific game, in limited minutes,” UK coach Mark Pope said. “You know, we felt better when he was on the floor. I thought he gave us a physicality and a length that was a real factor for us. So it was tough to manage with him not on the floor.”
Staying on the floor was the difficult part.
Moreno picked up his first foul with 15:09 left in the first half. Pope put him on the bench — it was about time for his regular first rest anyway — and UK was down 12-7 at that point. By the time Moreno checked back in less than two minutes later, the Wildcats were trailing 20-8.
He picked up his second foul immediately but stayed in the game, fighting for another offensive rebound that turned into two putback points on the very next possession. By the time he was called for his third foul — with 5:47 left in the first half — Moreno already had seven rebounds.
The 7-footer sat the rest of the first half and then came out and grabbed two more rebounds right off the bat after halftime, helping to spark UK’s 7-0 run out of the break, capping that flurry with a dunk to narrow Florida’s lead to 43-41.
And then came foul number four, a needless extending of the arms into the back of Condon, who didn’t have the ball and wasn’t in a particularly threatening position, with 18:23 remaining.
“The fourth foul was a killer,” Pope said. “That was a young play.”
Moreno is a young player. And he’s clearly still learning the college game. But the strides over the past few weeks have been impossible to ignore.
Earlier in the season, the teenager would often shy away from contact. Playing his high school ball in Kentucky opposite centers who were much smaller, Moreno wasn’t used to reciprocating the kind of physicality that he was seeing on a regular basis against high-major college bigs.
Sometimes he returned the favor. Sometimes he didn’t. As the season wore on, he seemed to get more comfortable with the contact. It came to a head a month ago in Knoxville, where Moreno’s inconsistency as a post battler was apparent against a physical Tennessee squad.
“I think he was disappointed with his first half at Tennessee. I think that stuck with him over the last few weeks,” Pope said before the Florida game. “He’s like, ‘That’s not happening again.’ I think he felt like he got a little bit dominated, especially on the defensive side — him guarding in the post.”
There was no sign of hesitance in Gainesville, despite the caliber of the competition.
When Moreno headed to the bench with that fourth foul Saturday, the Cats had taken a 23-20 advantage in the battle of the boards and narrowed the heavily favored Gators’ lead on the scoreboard to just two points.
While he was sitting on the bench, Florida outrebounded the Cats 9-4 to flip that advantage on the boards. The Gators had also turned their 43-41 lead into a 63-54 score over the nearly seven minutes that Moreno was forced to watch, filling up the stat sheet with second-chance opportunities and points in the paint during his absence.
Moreno managed to play nearly all of the final 11:54 without fouling out. The 11 rebounds tied a season high and marked the first time he’d hit double digits in SEC play. He did it against the best rebounding team in the country.
And while Pope wasn’t a fan of the fourth foul, he’s made it clear that — as Moreno learns to play a different brand of ball in college — he’d rather his young center err on the side of punishment. A couple of days before the Florida game — not the first time Moreno has found himself in foul trouble in recent weeks — Pope said there was no such thing as him being overly aggressive on the court.
“There’s no overkill,” he said. “I want him to be like 100% physicality, 100% aggressiveness all the time. He is putting together a really terrific freshman season, and he’s not even scratching the surface of what he’s going to be. A lot of it is going to be him harnessing his force and physicality and imposing that. … He’s got the ability to do that. So we just want to keep growing that and fostering that, and all gas on that, for sure.”
Kentucky didn’t get the result it wanted Saturday, but the loss served as yet another step in Moreno’s progression. He matched the Gators’ physicality, something that certainly won’t hurt his confidence. He lived with the consequences of an ill-advised foul, something that should serve as a lesson for the future.
Going by offseason expectations, Moreno has been one of the biggest surprises on this Kentucky team. He leads the Cats in rebounding and is growing into a physical force, but Pope sees much more to his game.
Moreno, the coach says, has a high ceiling as a passer and as a defender. Pope noted that he’s not a “turnover guy” — something that often plagues freshman bigs — and the numbers back that up. Moreno has never committed more than two turnovers in a game — and he’s had that many just twice in SEC play — while handling the ball quite a bit for a big and carrying a 1.8 assist/turnover ratio into Tuesday’s late-night game against Georgia in Rupp Arena.
There will be bumps along the road. Pope noted that Moreno was also pushed around some in UK’s loss to Vanderbilt last month, but that was true of every Wildcat on that night.
“Ever since kind of getting beat up at Vandy, he’s demonstrated a real physical presence on the floor,” he said. “And I thought he was really effective tonight. … Aside from the fouls, he was really good.”
A loss is a loss, and talk of silver linings afterward isn’t often well-received in the UK basketball world. But as Moreno gets more opportunities to play against teams like Florida and Tennessee and Vanderbilt — as he sees different looks and changing styles — his game will continue to grow.
And that’s one big positive for the future of Pope’s program.
“You’re facing a different scenario every single game,” the coach said heading into the Florida matchup. “Like, he’s going to face Chinyelu, who’s a guy he’s never faced — like, a style of play that he has not faced — and it’s going to be really exciting. You know, a frontline like Tennessee is probably something he hadn’t faced before. They’re different than Gonzaga’s frontline, right? And he was in a much different role than he was before.
“So as a freshman, you get to face something you’ve never seen before, and so it’s a first time for everything. It’s hard when it’s the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, 10th time you’re facing something. But as a first-time guy, man, he’s done incredible.”
