LEXINGTON, Ky. — Back in the summer, when John Calipari hypothesized over what coaching challenges he would face with the 2022-23 Kentucky Wildcats, one the UK head man surely never considered would be his needing to justify keeping Oscar Tshiebwe on the court.
Yet after Tshiebwe had a second-straight subpar offensive game and struggled mightily in defending against the high pick-and-roll for about the 803rd time this season during UK’s dispiriting 88-73 home loss to Arkansas on Tuesday night, Calipari found himself being questioned over why he played the reigning men’s college basketball national player of the year over lightly used sophomore reserve Daimion Collins.
“You know, you as a coach, you go with what got you there, and I wanted to — it was a bigger picture for Oscar than just this game,” Calipari said. “It was like, ‘Let’s get him going just to get him right.’ ”
In what has devolved into yet another UK men’s hoops season of discontent, Calipari gets bludgeoned in the court of public opinion over pretty much anything he says. However, the Kentucky coach was correct that stabilizing the listing ship that is UK basketball starts with getting Tshiebwe “right.”
As Kentucky (16-8, 7-4 SEC) prepares to travel to Georgia to face Mike White’s struggling Bulldogs (14-10, 4-7 SEC, losers of three straight and five out of six) on Saturday at noon, the Wildcats’ season is very much on the brink.
UK’s NCAA Tournament hopes are not just imperiled by the fact the Wildcats are 1-7 in Quad 1 games — those contests deemed by the NCAA to be the most difficult and impressive to win. Kentucky’s NCAA tourney profile is weighted down by the fact the Wildcats have lost those seven Quad 1 games by an average of 14.1 points a contest.
The good news, if you are a glass half-full type, is that Kentucky’s final seven games offer at least four more chances for the Wildcats to register Quad 1 wins — vs. Tennessee and at Mississippi State, at Florida and at Arkansas. There’s also a chance that Auburn in Rupp Arena could be a Quad 1 opportunity.
However, if you take a glass half-empty view — or are a realist based off what we’ve seen so far from Kentucky in 2022-23 — there’s not much reason for confidence that Calipari’s Cats are suddenly going to start running off Quad 1 victories.
What chance there is for the Wildcats to get things going almost certainly starts with getting Tshiebwe back on the beam.
One wonders how much the surgical knee procedure that the 6-foot-9, 255-pound Tshiebwe underwent in October that cost him a month of preseason training has impacted his performance. Whatever the reason, Tshiebwe does not seem to have as much “lift” to his game nor the same ability to beat people up and down the court that he displayed in 2021-22.
There are two components to getting Tshiebwe’s season restarted.
Offensively, the UK star is coming off, arguably, his two worst games as a Wildcat. In Kentucky’s 72-67 win over Florida, Tshiebwe missed 12 of 14 shots and scored only four points, though he did have 15 rebounds, three assists and a steal.
During Tuesday’s beat down from Arkansas, Tshiebwe took only six shots, making three, and finished with seven points, seven rebounds, two assists and three steals.
Making Tshiebwe’s struggles vs. the Gators and Razorbacks more jarring, he scored 30 points in UK’s two-point loss at Arkansas last season and had 27 points in both of Kentucky’s victories over Florida in 2021-22.
One wonders if the chronic issues Tshiebwe has faced this season while attempting to defend against high-ball-screen actions have negatively impacted his confidence in a way that has begun to spill over to his offense.
This season’s pattern has been for teams to abuse the defense of UK and Tshiebwe with the two-man game, then brag about how easy it was afterward.
“We knew that their coverages (weren’t) that good,” Arkansas guard Davonte Davis said after the Razorbacks hit 32 of 51 shots against Kentucky. “Just knowing that Oscar wasn’t up to par on the pick-and-roll, so we knew that we wanted to just continue to attack the goal and feed the bigs running down to the paint.”
With a team — and a star player — who have had so much trouble trying to stop the high pick-and-roll, a more philosophically flexible coach might negate that as a factor by deploying a heavy dose of zone defense. For Calipari, playing man-to-man seems the core foundational belief in his approach to basketball, so switching to an alternate defense has never really been an option.
Still, even if it has to be in the context of different man-to-man concepts vs. the pick-and-roll, it is incumbent on the Kentucky brain trust to figure out a way to put Tshiebwe in position to succeed defensively.
Suffice to say, with Kentucky’s NCAA tourney hopes hanging in the balance, the hour is late and the clock is ticking on those efforts.
