by Paul Jordan
Think Bruce Pearl has any more funny, funny jokes about Kentucky’s shooting now? Pfft. Bruce Pearl wishes his Vols could look “like Kentucky out there launching those things”. In case you forgot, Pearl uttered his funny, funny line about UK’s 3-point shooting after Tennessee launched 4-23 bricks against LSU. Stupid move Bruce.
It’s kind of like the urban legend we hear about the drunken frat boy who taunts the lions at the zoo and then they find themselves falling into the lion’s den. It’s never pretty.
And in this case, Bruce Pearl was the drunken frat boy taunting the Lions, and the lions were um, Wildcats and well, DeMarcus Cousins was a beast as Kentucky beat the Orange out of the Volunteers 74-45 to advance to the SEC Tournament Finals for the first time in six seasons.
If not for a 16-30 shooting performance from the line by the Cats, this game would have been even worse. In what amounted to to a fantastic tuneup for the NCAA Tournament, UK dominated the #13 team in the country and led for the entire 40 minutes, aside from a couple of early ties. The first half was actually a pretty close game with UK leading 23-19 with just less than five minutes remaining. UK went on a 9-0 run to close out the half and UK took a healthy 32-19 lead which represented the Vols lowest scoring half of the season. Kentucky shot 50% for the half compared to the Vols 28.6 and UK had a slight rebound advantage at 18-15.
Tennessee scored the first four points after half, and Calipari called a quick timeout to get his charges under control. UK responded well and still led 38-27 five minutes into the second half, not allowing the Vols to make any inroads. Then the bombs started dropping. Eric Bledsoe’s back to back treys pushed the lead to 17. To their credit, the Vols responded from this near knockout punch and cut the Kentucky lead to 45-39 with around nine minutes left.
Bledsoe responded with another trey and then Darnell Dodson hit back to back threes and then Dodson had a nice exclamation point dunk that put the Cats up 17, at 58-41 with 6:14 remaining, and for all intent and purposes, the Vols were roadkill.
The entire game was an intense display of hatred between the two team and Kentucky took offense to Pearl’s cracks about their shooting and hit 52.1% of their shots and delivered 8 three point daggers to Tennessee’s heart. The Vols could not respond, and shot 30.9% from the floor and had as many technical fouls (2) as three point baskets. Kentucky dominated in the paint and outrebounded the Vols 40-26. And this outburst came against the team that knocked off number one Kansas. Impressive.
DeMarcus Cousins dominated with 19 points and 15 rebounds and kept his composure in an especially chippy game where he was slugged in the gut by the Vols Melvin Goins. Cousins even played the peacemaker dragging Daniel Orton away from words with Wayne Chism. Eric Bledsoe hit 5-8 treys and had 17 points. Bledsoe’s rediscovering of his shooting stroke was most timely and important. John Wall had 14 points, 9 assists and 6 boards as his early play set the tone for the game for UK. All in all, a great performance by the Cats and I will refuse comment on what happened between Cal and Orton early in the game to be hashed out in the locker room.
Kentucky made a strong argument for number one seed overall tonight, but need some help from Kansas State to move into that spot. Regardless, UK has the overall number two seeding for the NCAA’s locked up and UK fans can look for a migration to Syracuse and see how much blue we can get in that stadium in a couple of weeks.
For complete game stats, click here.
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