Kentucky tops Duke at Champions Classic, earns early signature win

On By Pranco

play

ATLANTA — We’ll have plenty of time, maybe a decade or two, to talk about it Cooper Flagg. And in the aftermath of Tuesday’s Champions Classicthe presumptive number 1 pick will get a real taste of what the sports world is all about for the first time.

Here’s how it works when you live up to the hype for 39 minutes, but mishandle a ball in a crowd and then dribble it off your foot with the match on the line. It’s better to get used to it.

But Flagg is 17 years old and Duke is still a Final Four caliber team. It’s way too early to start nitpicking.

However, it’s not too early to pass judgment on the other big storyline of a remarkable night of college basketball.

Mark Pope? Yep, he’s the real deal too. Just a few weeks into the college basketball season, he has already made Kentucky basketball fun again.

It’s been a while.

“This group is special,” Pope said afterward Kentucky‘S 77-72 winwhich immediately gave him a signature victory and at a time when there was (and probably still is) some uncertainty as to whether he can handle this mammoth job.

Time will tell. But you can already see one thing: there is a big change in the atmosphere surrounding basketball in Kentucky.

Freed from the strain of John Calipari’s stubbornness, his deteriorating relationship with the Kentucky government and his hostile attitude toward a fan base that cares about sports like no other, Big Blue Nation won’t find it difficult to play this brand of basketball. embrace.

It’s beautiful, it’s energetic and, above all, free of drama.

Yes, Kentucky needed change. They have it. And it looks like they’re really going to like it.

Nothing against Calipari, a Hall of Fame coach whose first decade there was phenomenal. But the whole operation fizzled, it became contentious, and his final four seasons were a slow-motion train wreck that ended with a number of embarrassing NCAA Tournament defeats.

But when Calipari left for Arkansas, there were no guarantees about how things would turn out for Big Blue Nation. After all the big names said no, the initial reaction to Pope was strongly negative.

Despite being part of Kentucky’s 1996 National Title Teamhe was still a coach without NCAA Tournament wins in nine years at Utah Valley and BYU.

Of course, Kentucky fans were quick to embrace Pope because there really was no other choice. Not only was he one of them, he reminded them what that actually meant. For 15 years, the program focused on the Calipari brand. From the moment he got the job, Pope was determined to turn that around and make Kentucky the star of the show.

That’s a great way to start a honeymoon, but you have to show it on the floor too. And with a roster that Pope had assembled largely from the transfer portal, there was a scenario where Year 1 was effectively a write-off.

“Nobody knew each other,” Pope said.

But you can already tell that Pope is very good at three things that will serve him well as Kentucky’s coach.

The first is that he has an incredible understanding of how players interact and feed off each other. For example, he talked about the human nature of people to withdraw from problems and the intentionality it takes to do the opposite. You saw that on Tuesday when Kentucky fell behind by 10 points in the first half and just hung in the game until the experience and physicality of the older players took over in the final minutes.

“I felt like it was really special for us,” said senior Andrew Carr, a forward who transferred from Wake Forest and scored 17 points with two huge and-1 finishes in the final minutes. “Not everything went the way we wanted, and the coach talks about changing into each other, the people that matter, and the closer we get, it becomes harder to beat us.”

The second major characteristic of a Pope team is the offense. It just flows. One of the biggest frustrations fans had with Calipari for years was that the ball wasn’t moving enough, there wasn’t enough spacing and he didn’t emphasize three-point shooting until his final season. That’s not a problem with Pope. The ball zips around, guys get off the ball and everyone has the green light to shoot when it’s open. This was the goal: Kentucky made 10 of 25 threes to Duke’s 4 of 23.

And the third is that Kentucky just plays really, really hard, which it will have to do against most teams. The Wildcats have some good pieces, but they won’t have a huge talent advantage in most of their big games — and they certainly didn’t against a Duke team with multiple future NBA draft picks. That may be the biggest reason why Kentucky’s effort weakened Duke so much that Flagg was too exhausted to run down the stretch after scoring 26 points and grabbing 12 rebounds in 32 minutes.

“The guys sat in the locker room (at halftime) and it was constructive,” Pope said. “Guys do most of the recovery before I get in the locker room. It was just grit and determination. There was a lot of ebb and flow, and the game almost swung away from us, and the guys pulled it in.”

It’s still too early in the college basketball season to draw a lot of conclusions about where Kentucky or Duke will finish. But for Pope, a man who has perhaps the best but toughest job in college basketball, it was an affirming night.

He said after the game that he would have felt the same about his team whether they won or lost, and that’s probably true. But beating Duke is no small feat, and the amount of belief and credibility Kentucky will gain from this win will have a cascading effect on the fan base, on recruiting, and on the confidence of a team that believes it has something special.

All in all, Big Blue Nation couldn’t have asked for anything more.

With the USA TODAY app you can quickly get to the heart of the news. Download for award-winning reporting, crosswords, audio stories, the eNewspaper and more.