Mark Pope's thoughts on a frustrating win over Western Kentucky

The Kentucky Wildcats beat the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers 87-68. While the Wildcats led the majority of the game, they were frustrated by the Hilltoppers all night. They could not find a consistent rhythm and missed more shots than they were used to, and Western Kentucky's defense was aggressive and disruptive. What did Mark Pope have to say after the game?

Pope compared it to a first-round NCAA tournament game, "I'm proud of how our guys responded and just kept grinding and grinding and grinding away. We felt like this was a great run at a potentially first-round game for us." He said that his guys wanted to approach this game with that sort of mentality and that it played out that way. "It's what we wanted. There was a ton of frustration oozing throughout the whole game, and I thought our guys did a great job of staying together and just kind of being okay with moving on to the next play."

He was impressed with their ability on the defensive end of the floor, pointing out Jaxson Robinson, Lamont Butler, and Andrew Carr as defensive playmakers. They held Western Kentucky to the lowest field goal percentage they have held any team to so far this year, at 31.8%.

Mark Pope named Andrew Carr as the star of the game: "In every facet."

"There were stretches in the game that we weren't functioning great on the offensive end and we were finding great joy on the defensive end. That is a winning formula." Pope said in the press conference. He goes on to say that there will be games like this one that are just not clicking. Though he laughed and said, "But we still scored 87 points, that's the crazy part of it." He said, though, that the effort on the defensive end will always help in those games. That's how they can win these games. That is what Kentucky did tonight.

He continued to shout out Western Kentucky's pressure and said he was happy to have seen it because the Wildcats are going to see it a lot. As Mark Pope sees it, it was an opportunity for growth for Kentucky, and "when we get it right, we will actually really, really punish teams for pressuring."