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CLEVELAND — Apparently Kentucky plays a little harder than West Virginia thought.
One day after West Virginia guard Daxter Miles said he didn’t think UK played hard, the No. 1 Wildcats blistered West Virginia 78-39 in the NCAA Tournamenet Midwest Region.
The outcome was never in doubt as UK ripped off 16 unanswered points to take an 18-2 lead less than eight minutes into the game. The vaunted West Virginia press that was supposed to be a matchup nightmare for UK was non-existent as hot shooting early by Aaron Harrison and solid offense by Trey Lyles sparked the Cats to a ridiculous 44-18 halftime lead.
That’s just not supposed to happen in a NCAA Sweet Sixteen game — but it did. Now Notre Dame, which beat Wichita State, will get its chance to slow down the Wildcats in the Elite Eight.
However, as the Cats have been saying all season, when they play their best, the opponent is in trouble.
Just ask West Virginia coach Bob Huggins, who was 8-2 against UK coach John Calipari going into Thursday night’s game.
“They shot the ball really poorly the last game, and they're too good to have a probably back-to-back bad days shooting the ball, and they came out and made a bunch of shots. We're trying to scramble around and leave the right guy open. They were aggressive, they took it to the basket and we couldn't score, which was my biggest fear was that we would have a hard time scoring,” said Huggins.
How hard?
West Virginia shot 24.1 percent — 13 of 54 — from the field and was 2-for-15 from 3-point range. The Mountaineers went eight minutes without a field goal to start the second half and had five players who combined to go 1-for-18 from the field.
“When we play defense, that’s just what happens to teams,” UK junior Willie Cauley-Stein, who had eight points, 10 rebounds, three blocks, two steals and one assist in his normal stat-stuffing game, said.
Plus, the Cats felt disrespected by what Miles said. They could understand West Virginia players saying they expected to beat Kentucky. But to question if the Cats played hard and openly say they didn’t was perceived as a sign of disrespect by the players, especially coupled with the talk about how West Virginia’s press would take a toll on the Cats.
Kentucky had just 10 turnovers and no player had more than two. Freshman guard Tyler Ulis, who admitted he took the insults personally, did not have a floor miscue in 26 minutes and dished out four assists.
“They probably should have just kept their mouths shut,” a smiling Ulis said. “Sometimes we come out flat, but when you trash talk we will not do that.”
When Kentucky got West Virginia down, Ulis admitted the Cats wanted to “kill their spirit” and extend the lead.
“We beat them by 30 (actually 39), but we wanted to beat them by 50,” Ulis said. “We felt they disrespected us. They talked so much trash that we wanted to prove something. I felt like it didn’t make much sense to talk like they did, so we had to show them something.”
Kentucky, as usual, won with a balanced offense:
— Freshman Trey Lyles had 10 first-half points and finished with 14 points, seven rebounds, two assists, one block and one steal.
— Sophomore guard Aaron Harrison, who dislocated his left ring finger in the second half but popped it back in place himself, had 12 points — all in the first half on 4-for-6 shooting.
— Point guard Andrew Harrison was just 2-for-6 from the field, but he was aggressive driving and went 9-for-10 at the foul line to score 13 points. He also had four steals as UK’s press helped forced 13 turnovers and he had two assists and one block. He did make two turnovers in the second half, but the issue had been settled far before that.
— Perhaps most important for UK was that Devin Booker and Dakari Johnson both had 12 points. Both had struggled making shots recently. Booker went 5-for-8 from the field and hit two 3-pointers while Johnson was 4-for-5 from the field and 4-for-4 at the foul line where UK made 26 of 32 shots — an 81 percent mark. Johnson also had six rebounds and two blocks in a much more dominant performance than what he had shown recently.
Calipari said he wasn’t sure the pregame talking by West Virginia inspired his players as much as they said — something every UK player vowed did motivate them.
“We've had teams talk about the game. I mean, what, someone's going to come in and say we're going to lose and they're going to say they're going to win but we say at some point you have to step in the ring, we'll lift the rope, you've got to come in here,” Calipari said. “I don't want my team playing angry, I don't want them to be mean, nasty, hateful, I don't want that. It's not us against the world.
“It is play with joy and love of the game and love of each other. That wins every time. The other stuff turns to fear. When it's not going good and you're mad and you're trying to elbow and all of a sudden you miss a shot, your physiology is real close to fear. They may have said we wanted to win by 50, but they won because they were focused on how we had to do it against this team because we beat a really good team pretty good.”
Yet the Cats were far from satisfied despite the 39-point beatdown.
“I think that was good defensive-wise, but we did not do as much on offense as we can,” freshman Karl-Anthony Towns, who had only one point and two rebounds in 13 minutes, said. “We played a great game, but still not up to our full capability. We’ve got things to work on. Just because we played great doesn’t mean we were hitting on all cylinders. We just went out and played Kentucky basketball, but there’s still more to show.”
Just don’t try convincing the Moutaineers.
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