How will the Kentucky Wildcats stop Kemba Walker

Welcome to Houston Kentucky Wildcats, too bad you’re not going to be able to enjoy it because you’re going to have to worry about stopping Kemba Walker.

All year the junior guard out of Connecticut has been tearing it up and since the Maui invitational, he has been a media darling for ESPN and everyone else in America and it has been well deserved. Walker has scored 30 points in 10 games, and one 40 point game. That’s 11 games where Walker has been just unstoppable. Every game you flip on and see UConn on the screen, you may not know about basketball, but you knew one thing…Kemba Walker will get his.

Let’s face it, the lowest scoring game Walker has had all year is eight against the Syracuse zone. The key to stopping Walker is to limit his scoring looks, because barring some kind of miracle or foul trouble, Walker will score and get his against Kentucky, that’s a given, it’s going to happen.

Maybe the Cat’s could go zone, the worst part of Walker’s game may be his three point shooting where he shoots it at about 33 percent, and he tends to do it on a lot of shots such as against Michigan St. earlier in the season where Walker had four three pointers but did it on 11 shots. That is a typical Walker game. He’s attempted over 700 shots this season and has connected on 247 of those. He jacks up a lot of shots and has just about shook off the whole ‘a team can’t win with only one player’ because he’s flat out did all he can do for UConn this season.

The key to stopping Walker, is similar to the key to stopping Jared Sullinger earlier in the tournament. Walker is going to get his, I’ve said it once in this post, I’ll say it again, barring some sort of defensive miracle, him scoring 14 or less is not going to happen, and if it does Kentucky will win big, but he’s going to score 20 or more every time he steps out onto the court. The key to beating him though, instead where Cal just went with Harrellson one on one with Sullinger is, you’ve got to make Walker shoot a lot of shots to get his points, you’ve got to make him jack up some bad shots and rebound to have them waste possessions.

The way that Kentucky has been playing defensively lately is DeAndre Liggins has been put on the point guard every game to disrupt the offense, and quite frankly, it’s worked. This time it’s a little different, the best player for the other team is also, the point guard. Back in the game in Maui, Brandon Knight had the assignment of guarding Walker for the majority of the game, this time look for Liggins to be guarding Walker and to limit his looks because look, Walker is listed as 6’1 and Liggins is at least 6’6, it’s going to be tough for Walker to get that little cross over, step back off against a much bigger and agile Liggins.

Another valid point is that help defense may be more important than the on-ball defense by Liggins. No matter how good Liggins is, he’s going to have trouble keeping Walker out of the lane. Since Kentucky so rarely uses the zone, it’s going to be VERY important for other players to help keep Walker out of the lane, but the end of the SEC season seems to have brought on a new defensive swagger for the Wildcat’s and one can’t help but like it going against a very good UConn team.

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