Home Sweet Home: Kentucky Wildcats roll over the Tennessee Volunteers 73-61 at Rupp Arena
By Paul Jordan
All it took was a return to the friendly confines of Rupp Arena for the Kentucky Wildcats to break the funk of their two game losing streak. Kentucky broke open a sloppy game in the first half and held off a couple of Tennessee challenges to cruise to a 73-61 SEC victory. Perhaps it was just the sight of the sweaty Bruce Pear in his day glow orange blazer that brought out the fight in the Wildcats but they stuck it to the Vols for a full forty minutes and made it look relatively easy tonight.
The Wildcats got off to a extremely cold and sloppy start, missing their first five shots. Fortunately the Vols started equally cold and slowas well and a DeAndre Liggins three pointer put the first points on the board for both teams. The luggish play continued on both sides and it looked like it would be a tight, low scoring affait with the score knotted at five almost 5:00 into the game. Brandon Knight hit a three and Kentucky started to pull away a bit thanks to the aggressive defense of DeAndre Liggins and the inside scoring of Terrence Jones. Liggins made the score 16-9 Kentucky with a layup at the 12:09 mark.
At that point, the floodgates opened. Doron Lamb nailed two treys and DeAndre Liggins another as Kentucky sprinted to a 27-13 lead with 7:43 left in the half. A Josh Harrellson tip in made it 33-14 at the 5:49 left in the half. Kentucky forced 5 Tennessee turnovers during this stretch and hit the boards hard to extend the gap.
But as the story of the season has been, Brandon Knight picked up his second foul and it’s obvious that this is not the same team without Knight in the lineup. The Wildcats went cold the rest of the half and went the rest of the way without a field goal. The Vols gradually cut into the lead and thanks to three pointers by Josh Bone and Scotty Hopson in the last 1:05, the score was just 35-28 at the half.
The Vols cut the lead to 35-30, but that was the high point of their game. DeAndre Liggins set the pace for the half with his drives and Brandon Knigh found Josh Harrellson on back to back layups and Kentucky jumped out to a 51-33 lead with 15:16 remaining and for all purposes, removed most of the drama from the game. The Vols got no cloer than 12 points the rest of the way and Kentucky relied on the scoring from it’s veteran players for a change to coast to the 73-61 win.
The value of DeAndre Liggins could not be understated tonight. He led the way in scoring with 19 points on 5-6 shooting and had 5 boards, 5 steals and 3 assists. Josh Harrellson had 16 points and 6 boards and Josh went 7-8 from the field. This broke a long scoring drought for Harrellson and hopefully is a sign of things to come. The duo of Harrellson and Liggins outscored the freshman trio 35-31 as Knight had 12 points and Jones had 10. Darius Miller added seven to give the veteran leadership crew 42 points.
Granted, it was great to see the leadership and scoring from the older guys. And when those guys are scoring, the entire team is better and tonight was an example of that. Kentucky still has a tough road game Saturday at Vanderbilt, but if the Cats win that, you can see them gettting back into the SEC race. That win would make them 6-4 with four of the last six games at Rupp Arena. It feels good to not have to nitpick tonight. It was a nice bounceback win and I just hope we can maintain focus on Saturday.
For complete game stats, go here.
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