Georgia's rebounding, aggressiveness gave Kentucky a run for their money

By LARRY VAUGHT

LEXINGTON — Georgia coach Mark Fox said sometimes when Kentucky doesn’t win by as big a margin as some think it should, it might be that the other team simply played well.

“I don’t want to evaluate how Kentucky played,” said Fox after his team lost 69-58 to the Wildcats here Tuesday night. “This league is a lot deeper than people think. What makes me angry is why does everybody in this league have to beat Kentucky to be worthwhile.”

Fox noted that while the belief is that UK is good enough to go undefeated — the Wildcats are now 22-0 — it puzzles him why Southeastern Conference teams get no credit for playing well against UK. Georgia was down 18 points with 18 minutes to play yet cut the lead to five points late in the game before UK closed on a 6-0 run.

“I am glad he got mad,” Kentucky coach John Calipari said. “They are playing well and had one of their best players out, and they stayed in this game. Mark had his best player and still had a chance to win the game in this building. That tells you a lot about Georgia.”

Even more surprising, Georgia outrebounded UK 36-24 despite playing without its leading scorer and rebounder, Marcus Thornton, who was out with a concussion.

Nemanja Djurisic said the Bulldogs lacked focus in the first half, but never quit believing they could win — or win the rebounding battle.

“We kept trying to box out and stay matched up,” said Djurisic, who had 17 points and seven rebounds. “We had to do that to win. They have a lot of bigs and great players, so we had to eliminate that rebounding. We just didn’t start the game with enough focus.”

Guard Charles Mann said the Bulldogs wanted to attack Kentucky’s size.

“Coach wanted us to be aggressive and make plays. Kentucky is good, but you still have to make plays that you can,” Mann said. “Coach wanted us to attack rebounding and we did that I think. We came up short, but we got back in the game and had a chance.”

Fox said Georgia is a “scrappy team” that knew it had to offset UK’s size and did other than Karl-Antony Towns having 15 points and 13 rebounds. Willie Cauley-Stein had just five rebounds, Marcus Lee one and Dakari Johnson one. Kentucky also had just three blocked shots — with two by Towns.

“We felt like rebounding the ball would be important. Nothing that we did special. We just tried to play really hard,” Fox said.

Calipari said one reason his team got outrebounded by double digits was the absence of freshman Trey Lyles, who missed the game with an illness.

“Not having Trey Lyles hurts us. He gives us one more strong, physical player,” Calipari said.

The coach said as “sick as he is” he doubted he would not play Saturday at Florida depending on whether he could practice the next two days.