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Kentucky beats Duke in Champions Classic for early victory

Sakege November 13, 2024

ATLANTA – We will have plenty of time, perhaps a decade or two, to talk about Cooper Flag. And as a result of Tuesday’s Champions Classiche presumed number 1 pick He is going to taste for the first time what the world of sports is all about.

That’s how it works when you live up to expectations for 39 minutes but mishandle a ball in the crowd and then dribble it with your foot with the game on the line. You better get used to it.

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

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

Marcos Papa? Yes, he is also authentic. Just a couple weeks into the college basketball season, he’s already making Kentucky basketball fun again.

It’s been a while.

“This group is special,” Pope said afterward. Kentucky‘s Victory 77-72giving him a signature victory right from the start and at a time when there was, and probably still is, some uncertainty about whether he is up to the task of this mammoth job.

Time will tell. But one thing can already be seen: There is a major change in the vibe around Kentucky basketball.

Freed from the strain of John Calipari’s stubbornness, his deteriorating relationship with the Kentucky administration and his antagonistic stance toward a fan base that cares like no other about sports, Big Blue Nation won’t have a hard time accepting this kind of basketball.

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

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

Nothing against Calipari, a Hall of Fame coach whose first 10 years there were phenomenal. But the entire operation grew stale, became controversial, and its final four seasons were a slow-motion train wreck that ended with some embarrassing NCAA tournament losses.

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

Despite being part of Kentucky 1996 national title teamhe was still a coach with no NCAA tournament wins in nine years at Utah Valley and BYU.

Kentucky fans, of course, quickly embraced Pope because there really was no other option. He wasn’t just one of them, he reminded them what that really meant. For 15 years, the show was about the Calipari brand. From the first moment he got the job, Pope was determined to turn it around and make Kentucky the star of the show.

That’s a great way to start a honeymoon, but you also have to prove it on the track. And with a roster Pope assembled largely through the transfer portal, there was a scenario where Year 1 was basically a write-off.

“Nobody knew each other,” Pope said.

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

The first is that it is incredibly attentive to how players interact with each other and feed off of each other. He spoke, for example, about human nature to walk away from problems and the intentionality it takes to do the opposite. You saw that Tuesday when Kentucky was down 10 points in the first half and continued to hold on in the game until the experience and physicality of its senior 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 was going the way we wanted, and Coach talks about becoming each other, the people who matter, and the closer we get, the harder it is to beat us.”

The second great trait of a Pope team is offense. It just flows. For years, one of the big frustrations fans had with Calipari is that the ball didn’t move enough, there wasn’t enough space and he didn’t emphasize the three-point shot until his final season. With Pope, that’s not a problem. The ball spins, guys move away from the ball, and everyone has the green light to shoot when they’re open. This was the ball game: Kentucky made 10 of 25 3-pointers to Duke’s 4 of 23.

And the third thing is that Kentucky plays very, very 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’s possibly the biggest reason why Kentucky’s effort simply wore down Duke to the point where Flagg was too exhausted to execute down the stretch after scoring 26 points and grabbing 12 rebounds in 32 minutes.

“The guys went and sat in the locker room (at halftime) and it was constructive,” Pope said. “The guys do most of the setup before I go into the locker room. It was pure resolve and determination. There was a lot of ebb and flow, and the game almost got out of hand, and the guys got it back.”

It’s still too early in the college basketball season to draw many conclusions about where Kentucky or Duke will end up. But for Pope, a man who has arguably the best but toughest job in college basketball, it was a night of validation.

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

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

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