Blue And White Delight by Maple Street Press

Blue and White Delight The Wildcats return to the college basketball elite by Glenn Logan

here is nothing more wondrous, satisfying, or fulfilling than seeing a once-proud program come back from a long absence from relevance. It is even more satisfying when that team is your favorite team—in this case, the Kentucky Wildcats. 2009–10 was a year that Kentucky celebrated many milestones and exploded back onto the scene as a national power. Kentucky fans can be forgiven for celebrating a little at the 2010 Elite Eight appearance by Kentucky, even though it was well short of the expectations many fans held for the team. The 2009–10 Wildcats were painfully young despite prodigious talent, but in the end, it was not youth but a lack of consistent outside shooting that declared their doom just short of their first Final Four since the 1990s. The 2009–10 Wildcats will be remembered for more than just being a talented team that fell short of the destiny Kentucky fans feel is their birthright. This was the year the joy returned to the Bluegrass after two agonizing seasons under former head coach Billy Gillispie. Joy was seemingly ever on the face of John Wall as he celebrated a spectacular move or a three-point shot. It could be seen on the face of DeMarcus Cousins as he flashed the “call me” sign at Mississippi State after receiving harassing phone calls from Bulldog fans during the days before the game. Not only were the Wildcats themselves suffused with joy for the game, but it was a pure pleasure to watch them play. Patrick Patterson returned to finish his degree in three years and develop the kind of diversity in his game that he needed to raise his draft stock. Eric Bledsoe blossomed unexpectedly

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DeAndre Liggins was an important reserve during the second half of 2009–10 and will challenge for a starting spot in 2010–11. 6 | Wildcat Tip-Off 2010–2011

rightfully so. Before Calipari was hired, Kentucky was facing another season of dreary mediocrity, with rumors that Patrick Patterson, Jodie Meeks, and others were leaning toward leaving due to differences with coach Billy Gillispie. But Gillispie was dismissed and Calipari hired, and from that moment, it was as if flowers and rainbows were all anyone could see in the Big Blue dawn of a new era of Kentucky basketball. Despite losing five of his best players to the NBA Draft, Coach Cal has managed to quickly reload the team in 2010–11 with young talent nearly as good as the players that must be replaced. If that weren’t enough to make the Big Blue Faithful jubilant, the incoming group seems much better suited to running Calipari’s trademark dribble-drive motion offense, an offense that has shredded opposing defenses over the years, and that we saw precious little of last year because of the team’s composition. The incoming group also promises to be more consistent from the perimeter, and the return of starter Darius Miler, major reserve DeAndre Liggins, and improving big man Josh Harrellson will help anchor the again painfully young Wildcats.

RETURN TO THE TOP OF THE HEAP When the 2009–10 Wildcats won their 19th game in a row by defeating the Arkansas Razorbacks 101–70 on January 23 in front of 24,356 ecstatic Kentucky fans, that old, familiar winning feeling had been back for a while. It had taken some time for the fans to get the unfortunate Gillispie years, with unexplainable losses both at home and away to teams that UK would normally beat convincingly, behind them. Last year’s Kentucky team found more ways to win games than Kentucky fans had seen since the Comeback ’Cats of 1997–98. If it wasn’t John Wall hitting jumpers to win versus Miami (Ohio), or Eric Bledsoe making dagger threes to put the game just out of reach versus Stanford, or a DeMarcus Cousins tip-in to put UK into overtime against Mississippi State in the SEC Tournament, it was Patrick Patterson helping the Wildcats overcome John Wall’s temporary loss to dehydration to hang on against the North Carolina Tar Heels. By the time the Arkansas Razorbacks came to Lexington on January 23, Kentucky was on the cusp of attaining something it had long been without: a national #1 ranking. Texas, the AP #1 team at the time, had lost twice that week, to Kansas State and Connecticut, leaving only the Razorbacks in the way of Kentucky’s first Associated Press #1 ranking since the final AP poll of 2002–03. Unfortunately, the Wildcats would drop the very next game to the Devan Downey-led South Carolina Gamecocks, making their stay at #1 a mere week (or just over 72 hours for the hypertechnical). Despite that, the 2009–10 team hovered near the top of both the AP and Coaches’ polls for the rest

Photo on previous page: Andy Lyons/Getty Images Photo this page: Joe Robbins/Getty Images

into a first-round NBA draft pick, as did Daniel Orton in only 6.5 minutes per game. 2009–10 was a celebration, and one that has yet to end in the commonwealth. Not only has excitement returned to the program on the court, but watching head coach John Calipari sign one highly ranked recruit after another, and seeing a record five Kentucky players taken in the first round of the NBA Draft, including the #1 overall pick in John Wall, has raised the thrill of being a Kentucky partisan to perhaps its highest level since the 1996 national championship. Instead of missing out on coveted recruits, the most highly touted seem to be lining up for a chance to come to Kentucky and play for Coach Cal. So just what was there to celebrate in the Bluegrass this past season? From being the first team to get to 2,000 wins, to reaching the later rounds of the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2004, to winning over 30 games for the first time since 2002–03, to an SEC regular season and tournament championship, to a national Player of the Year candidate in John Wall, 2009–10 was a the resurgence of winning basketball, of a great tradition, and a funeral for many years of lamentations and regrets. The shocking speed with which Kentucky has reversed its fortunes has been a matter of national sports comment, and

Blue And White Delight

Photo: Andy Lyons/Getty Images

The Wildcats celebrate the victory over the Arkansas Razorbacks in Rupp Arena that put them over the top for a #1 AP ranking. of the season, finishing the year at #2 in both. Even though Wildcat fans crave NCAA championships, not #1 rankings, the validation of high rankings has always been coveted by the Big Blue Faithful despite their protestations of the irrelevance of polls. Coach Cal, however, was a little bit dubious about the Wildcats’ lofty standing. According to Bryan Rickard of the State Journal, Calipari told the media after the Arkansas victory, “I asked the players afterward: ‘Are we this good? If we’re this good, this is going to be fun, boys.’ ” It turned out that the answer to Calipari’s question was a qualified “Yes”—they were that good when their perimeter game was clicking, and when Cousins, Patterson, and Orton were forcing zone defenses and double-teams. Unfortunately, those times occurred all too infrequently, particularly in the second half of the conference schedule when the three-ball stopped falling. Cousins drew two and even three players, taking him away from the block and forcing him to give up the ball to perimeter shooters who could not make open shots. As a result, the second half of the SEC season was very competitive indeed, and though UK’s margin of victory was frequently double digits, the Wildcats were putting opponents away very late in games.

THE NCAA TOURNAMENT Selection and Early Rounds Coming into the 2010 NCAA Tournament, the Wildcats were coming off their first outright SEC regular season championship in five years and their fist SEC Tournament championship since 2004. The success that the 2009–10 ’Cats were enjoying had been absent from Kentucky teams for a long time, and it only got better when the NCAA selection committee saw fit to send the Wildcats to the East Region in Syracuse as the #1 seed. This was yet another “first in a long time” for Kentucky, a program that has frequently found its way into top seeds in the NCAA Tournament since seeding began back in 1979. In fact, before 2010, Kentucky had been first-seeded nine times since 1979, its most recent being in the 2004 tournament. The fact that it had been five years since a UK team entered the tournament higher than a #8 seed made this a particularly sweet comeback, especially considering the NIT season of only a year earlier. The Wildcats ripped their way through the early rounds of the Tournament, defeating foes by an average margin of 25 points in the first three games. With Kansas losing in the second round to Northern Iowa and the powerful Syracuse Orange falling to eventual national finalist Butler in the third

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Eric Bledsoe and the Wildcats were dominant in the early rounds of the 2010 NCAA Tournament. round, Kentucky was suddenly reckoned by most analysts to be the outright favorite to win its eighth NCAA Tournament championship. But favorite or no, the young Wildcats had games to play, and it would be against their next opponent that their doom would be decided.

Kentucky holding a 13–4 advantage. Prior to 2010, Kentucky had faced West Virginia as recently as 2005 and again in 2008 in the Findlay Las Vegas Invitational, both Kentucky wins. This time, the second-seeded Mountaineers were known as one of the best defensive and offensive rebounding teams in the nation, but they figured to be overmatched against the bigger and stronger Wildcats. Bob Huggins knew his team did not have the strength to handle DeMarcus Cousins, Patrick Patterson, and Daniel Orton in the post, so man-to-man was out of the question. Of course, every team the Wildcats faced had zoned them in order to try to manage their inside strength and force them into perimeter shots, a strategy that so far had not proven to be particularly effective. But it was undoubtedly the best way to attack the Wildcats defensively and force them into shots that they might miss. But Huggins wasn’t satisfied with just throwing up a zone. Instead, he went with a 1-3-1 zone defense that Kentucky had seen very little of to that point in the season. Bruce Pearl at Tennessee had used an unusual 3-2 zone that confounded the Wildcats and got Tennessee an upset victory

In the end, the 2010 NCAA Tournament for the Wildcats would end in a way that seemed apropos to their season. Kentucky had defeated its first three opponents with an unbeatable combination of inside strength, offensive rebounding, and stifling defense. None of the Wildcats’ first three opponents had succeeded in forcing them into the only part of their game where they had been notably inconsistent all season: the perimeter shot. More importantly, none of the Wildcats’ first three opponents were able to shoot better than 35% from the field. Against East Tennessee State, the Wildcats had blistered the nets from beyond the arc to the tune of 43%. That returned to about average versus the Wake Forest Demon Deacons, where Kentucky managed 33%. But against the Cornell Big Red, Kentucky would make only 2-of-16 threepoint attempts, a harbinger of what was to come in the next game. The Wildcats still handled the undersized and less athletic Big Red with suffocating defense despite the poor shooting, but Kentucky’s regional final opponent would be Bob Huggins’s powerful West Virginia Mountaineers. The Mountaineers and Wildcats had met occasionally throughout the long history of college basketball, with

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Against East Tennessee State in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, Kentucky and John Wall were knocking down threes and making the game look easy.

Photo at top: Chris Graythen/Getty Images Photo at bottom: Chris Graythen/Getty Images

Kentucky vs. West Virginia

Blue And White Delight in Knoxville during the regular season, but that same strategy failed spectacularly when the Volunteers faced the ’Cats in the SEC Tournament. Huggins’s strategy, unfortunately for the Wildcats, worked to perfection. The Kentucky shooters kept taking the open perimeter jumpers they found themselves with, and kept missing them. In fact, Kentucky missed them to the tune of 4-for-32, or 12.5%. Needless to say, the poor shooting from the arc combined with 55% from the free-throw line led to the demise of the talented young Wildcats, sending them home to lick their wounds with only an Elite Eight appearance to show for their 35-win season.

THE NCAA TOURNAMENT AFTERMATH

Photo at bottom: Jim McIsaac/Getty Images Photo at top: Jim McIsaac/Getty Images

Kentucky fans were disappointed with the way the season ended, particularly with the inauspicious way in which the Wildcats went out. To some, it brought back memories of the dreadful 3-for-33 shooting in the second half in the 1984 NCAA final versus the Georgetown Hoyas. But to most, it was considered the most likely place for a team as inexperienced as the 2009–10 ’Cats to end their season. There is no doubt that after some of the Tournament favorites lost and Kentucky was handling its opponents with ease, many UK fans succumbed to the feeling that the team actually had what it took to win it all. Truth be told, they may have, but the inconsistency of their perimeter game was a known weakness that West Virginia managed to exploit to perfection. Not only that, the Wildcats could not manage to make free throws, which was yet another occasional bugaboo that had rarely cost the team much more than

Da’Sean Butler led the West Virginia Mountaineers to a 73–66 victory in the Elite Eight, ending the Wildcats season just short of the Final Four.

a closer-than-it should-have-been score, but was enough to seal their fate against a skilled and athletic Mountaineers team. Even though the 2009–10 Wildcats fell short of the Final Four, the Big Blue Nation will remember them as the team that brought Kentucky back from a five-year interregnum of darkness and doubt. Even as many feared it would take four or five more years for Kentucky to reach the level of glory to which the faithful had become accustomed, the remarkable, nearly overnight comeback will find a special place in the hearts of fans. It seems now that UK is back to its former glory, undimmed by the trials of the last five years, and once again ascendant in the college basketball pantheon. It seems only a matter of time until Kentucky is once again the king of the court, and the fear and loathing of opponents that has risen

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John Wall shakes NBA commissioner David Sterns’s hand as the #1 pick of the Washington Wizards. up from the callous indifference of the recent past stands in testimony to the return of the Wildcats to the national stage.

BLUE AND WHITE DELIGHT The 2009–10 Wildcats, these young guys who raised their game and defied the logic of the pundits to reach the pinnacle of the polls and nearly make it to college basketball’s final weekend, delighted Kentucky fans with their skill, confidence, and humble nature. Even though the entire starting five, except for Darius Miller, have moved on to professional riches in a historic NBA draft, their legacy will be the return of a once-proud program to prominence. John Wall, DeMarcus Cousins, Daniel Orton, Eric Bledsoe, and Patrick Patterson all wore Blue and White with great pride and distinguished themselves with their ability to share the ball, share the credit, and produce a memorable season that will be remembered. It is hard to say enough about the importance of the 2009–10 version of the Wildcats in the grand scheme of things. The success they enjoyed has been directly responsible for the advent of John Calipari’s second national #1 ranked recruiting class in a row, and the verbal commitments of 2012 high school superstars Michael Gilchrist, Anthony Davis, and

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Marquis Teague auger for yet another highly ranked class next year, possibly the third top class in a row. All this success is directly related to this team. Even though these Wildcats were not good enough to get all the way to the NCAA championship, they have paved the way for future teams to do so. As Kentucky fans everywhere prepare for 2010–11 and the excitement builds for yet another year of outstanding basketball in the Bluegrass, it is important to realize just how far the program has come in an unbelievably short time. Only three years ago, Kentucky had only one consensus top-25 player on its roster. Last year, it had five. This year, it will have four, plus five more who were ranked in the top 50 before coming to Kentucky. Will 2010–11 bring more delight to the fans of the Blue and White? It seems almost inevitable given the talent level and the success Coach Cal has had at meshing, molding, and developing that talent. This new team could bring more of the famous dribble-drive motion offense, better overall outside shooting, and significant inside power and skill. Defensively, Calipari has shown that he can teach young players to form an outstanding defensive team in only a year, as the 2009–10 Wildcats proved by finishing sixth in defensive efficiency in the nation. While it may be that the future of Kentucky lies in young teams and high turnover to the NBA, it remains to be seen if that strategy will be effective in bringing national championships back to the Bluegrass. Calipari has set Kentucky on this course for the foreseeable future, and it is a strategy that has never been attempted before in college basketball. Also, it remains to be seen what impact, if any, a potential NBA lockout might have on the strategy, or if the “one and done” rule winds up getting changed in some way that will significantly impact what Coach Cal has in mind. If the NBA decides to move the “one and done” rule to “two and done,” as many have speculated, it would be an immediate benefit to Kentucky’s strategy in recruiting the most highly ranked, best players available. Having that kind of talent on the team for two years rather than one would greatly enhance Kentucky’s chances for success. But regardless of any of that, the future of Kentucky basketball looks as bright as the blue and white on the Wildcats uniforms. Years of exciting, fast-paced basketball seem to be in store, and the Big Blue Nation is anxiously anticipating year two of John Calipari’s Wildcats. May it be blessed with many great victories. MSP

Glenn Logan is a lifelong University of Kentucky basketball fan. He is a small business owner, freelance writer, and managing editor of the SB Nation University of Kentucky weblog A Sea Of Blue, one of the largest and most popular UK fan sites on the Internet.

Photo: Al Bello/Getty Images

2010–2011 kentucky Wildcats