by Zach Rosen
Is the conference tournament over yet? I wonder if they still serve Sour Patch Kids at the concession stand…
As the conference tournament looms and postseason awards fall into the laps of so many UK players (three All-SEC selections, All-SEC freshman team, SEC All-Defensive team, SEC freshman of the year, SEC player of the year), we look at the conference tournament and begin to pontificate the match ups and concerns. Fans will look at the schedule and potential problems getting to the SEC tournament title and wonder if we can muster enough grit to get us through the games we could lose and whether we have enough maturity to keep the games we should win. But your concerns are trivial. Because coach John Calipari does not care about your conference tournament concerns. But don’t take it from me, here’s what he said:
“I am just glad that it is over. I just wanted it to end. I told them that we are playing for that other tournament. That is why we play. I have never coached a team that worried about a conference championship or a tournament championship. Every team that I have coached is worried about postseason and where we are going to get seeded. What happens is that instead of playing for that championship, you are playing for something bigger. I am not sure that we are quite there yet, but we have done everything that we were supposed to up to this point. We are playing for a one seed.”
SEE?! Proof that Cal doesn’t care about this team! He doesn’t care about the tradition. He doesn’t…wait, what? Oh…he has a point.
As much as Kentucky fans obsess about garnering every single honor and putting another year on the conference championship banner, it’s really not that big of a deal. The Cats already own 25 conference tourney championships and 44 regular season titles; we have proven that we dominate the SEC. Understandably the fans want this, we haven’t won either since 2005 and usually our conference tournament performance affects our seeding, prompting the tress over such matters.
But here’s the thing: this is a new era. Since about a month ago we’ve had the #1 seed locked up and everything since that point has just been to prove our case. Calipari doesn’t care because he is looking at the bigger picture. People haven’t rushed the corner of Euclid and Woodland Ave. to celebrate a conference regular season title. We wont riot like an old-fashioned West Virginia U football win because we captured the SEC tournament title again. We want the national championship.
We need another banner. It may sound selfish, but the fans in the commonwealth don’t have a pro team to follow and most don’t have a connection to the only other major athletic university in the state (unless you have an affinity for red flat-billed hats and and lecherous coaches). The fan base for Kentucky has been manufactured into our culture and programmed into our DNA. So Coach, please excuse us if we’re a little shocked by your statement, we’ll get over it soon enough. Just make sure your players are focused on the next game and not looking towards next Sunday’s bracket announcements. But for all of the comments Coach Cal made, he seems to be prepared to keep his teams’ head in the game.
From the start of his collegiate coaching career, John Calipari has shown up in the month of March. From his start at UMass, he worked hard to improve the entirety of the program and eventually won five consecutive regular season and conference championships (’92-’96) before making the jump to the NBA. After that failed experiment, he decided to return to the more fertile grounds of the collegiate coaching scene and accepted a job at the University of Memphis. He didn’t do much there, just posting 253 wins and nine 20-win seasons in nine years. He recruited blue-chip players, awoke an entire city to the fact that their local college had a basketball team, and came a few Derrick Rose free throws away from the National Championship in 2008.
The man seems to know when to kick the engine into a higher gear, and his postseason record speaks for itself. A 93-30 record in March, combined with a 36-14 record in postseason tournament play (21-9 n the NCAA, 15-5 in the NIT) means he knows when it matters. So when he says he doesn’t care about the conference tournament, please put down your pitchforks and torches. Take his word for it, this isn’t the tournament that matters. It’s the next one that I’ll be holding my breath for.
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