LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – If this season amounts to anything for the University of Kentucky basketball team – and increasingly, it appears as if it will – Saturday’s comeback from an 18-point deficit against No. 7-ranked Gonzaga in a 90-89 overtime victory will be remembered as a crucible moment.
After perhaps its worst first half of the season on both ends, Kentucky stormed back, using savvy second-half adjustments, a 1-3-1 zone defense and a good amount of grit after losing both of its top point guards.
It was the second time this season that Kentucky came from more than 10 points behind to beat a Top 10 team away from home.
And it was the kind of comeback that just doesn't happen against Gonzaga, which had won 175 in a row when leading at the half by double digits. But on Saturday, it fell prey to Kentucky’s biggest comeback in terms of deficit erased since the Comeback Cats beat Duke in the 1998 NCAA Tournament.
"Well, it was a heavyweight battle," Kentucky coach Mark Pope told Tom Leach on his Kentucky Sports Network postgame radio show. "I mean, listen, you bring Baylor in and you beat them by 40, like, you're really good, right? And Coach (Mark) Few is probably the best in the business. Their point guard (Ryan Nembhard) is incredibly special, and the way they play is so iconic, and to go on the road and do it in this gym with this crowd is pretty special for guys."
The win matches the largest halftime deficit (16) ever overcome by a Kentucky team, tying the Mardi Gras Miracle in 1994 and a win at Louisville in 2004.
Pope now has begun his Kentucky career with wins over the first two Top 10 teams he has faced. The only other Kentucky coach to do that was Adolph Rupp.
it was a remarkable moment for this rebuilt team – which has lost to Gonzaga each of the past two years with what many would have called more talented teams. At one point early in the second half, ESPN measured Kentucky's win probability at just five percent in a raucous Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle.
So they're saying there was a chance.
Jaxson Robinson was brilliant, moving into the point guard spot after Lamont Butler could not play because of a sprained ankle and Kerr Kriisa had to leave the game with a foot or ankle injury in the second half. A runner in the lane by Robinson with 14.5 seconds left put Kentucky up 90-86, then Gonzaga’s Nolan Hickman buried a contested three with five seconds remaining to pull Gonzaga within a point.
Andrew Carr was fouled with just over four seconds left and missed both free throws, but in Gonzaga’s scramble for a game-winning basket the Wildcats got a back-tip deflection and time expired.
The No. 4-ranked Wildcats used a 1-3-1 defense in the second half to slow Gonzaga, which had scored on two-thirds of its first-half possessions to take a 50-34 lead at the break.
We were having no success, right?" Pope said. "They were really just tearing us up in ball screens, because they're getting the ball screens in all different ways. We were trying to make adjustments to ball screen coverage, but they would get to it in such different ways, or they would reuse it -- they're so good and the reason is Nembhard is a really special IQ basketball player, manipulating the floor. So, the zone helped us. And then we kept changing up the zone. We can morph it pretty easy into some different things. And so we kind of had several different endings on the zone, and it just kind of just kind of let us stay afloat long enough to where we could kind of find our legs offensively. And the guys executed really well."
After the ‘Zags scored on three straight possessions to open the second half, including two on easy drives to the basket, Pope flashed a brief look at the zone, and kept going to it periodically for the rest of the half.
But the biggest second half change, according to guard Otega Oweh, was a halftime gut check.
“We didn’t come all the way out here just to get punked, to get embarrassed,” he said. “You just have to have some pride and come out and believe and play the way you know you can. . . . Just forget the score, come out and play hard and do the things we do.”
Otega said that, “given the players we have, there’s no excuse for us to get pushed around.”
Still, having slowed Gonzaga on offense, Kentucky needed to go to work on offense, and it did. The Wildcats made five straight shots, scoring nine points in a row, in a run that would grow to 13-0, then 16-2, and the Wildcats’ deficit was down to three.
Kentucky shot 53 percent in the second half and 71 percent in overtime. Carr led the way with 19 points – 13 in the second half and overtime – along with seven rebounds. Robinson, who played some point guard for Pope at BYI, added 18 points and five assists without a turnover. Otega Oweh added 13, Amari Williams 12 and Brandon Garrison 10, with nine rebounds.
On the UK Sports Radio Network, analyst Jack Givens couldn’t help but think of late Wildcats coach Joe B. Hall.
“I wish he could have seen this,” Givens said, remembering about Hall’s fondness for the 1-3-1.
"We talked about it at halftime, it takes some courage to get downhill and make plays and kind of get into the guts of the game and play off two feet," Pope said. "It actually takes some courage. And what I was really proud of is our guys have really had a huge emphasis on cutting away from the ball. And tonight you saw some two feet plays with cutters late. You saw a bunch of late passes from our bigs that were really great. So, we saw real progress against a really incredibly quality opponent in terms of our moving off the ball, and that's all triggered by getting downhill first. Guys worked really hard the last couple days. We have so far to go. It's not a one day growth, it's a week on week on week growth, but our guys are really buying in and trying "
Kentucky improved to 8-1 and bounced back from its first loss of the season, earlier in the week at Clemson.
The Wildcats return home to face Colgate on Wednesday before playing host to Louisville next Saturday.
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