Jaxon Kohler and Michigan State rolled over Kentucky on Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden. (Sarah Stier/Getty Images)
(Sarah Stier via Getty Images)
Mark Pope, clearly, still has some work to do with his team at Kentucky.
The Wildcats struggled against Louisville in a top-15 matchup last week, which led to Pope saying he wished he was “farther ahead with this group” a few days later, and then they completely fell flat on Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden. No. 17 Michigan State rolled to a blowout 83-66 win over No. 12 Kentucky at the State Farm Champions Classic.
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Kentucky, though undoubtedly still incredibly talented and capable of making a meaningful run in the coming months, now sits at 3-2 after stumbling in both chances it has had to make an early statement.
“We’re far away from the team we hope and aspire to be, and we can’t waste a second on trying to grow into that,” Pope said, via ESPN. “We’re disappointed and discouraged and completely discombobulated right now.”
Michigan State, on the other hand, improved to 4-0. The Spartans beat John Calipari and Arkansas earlier this month, too, and look very capable of holding their own in a very talented Big Ten conference later this season.
After a short back-and-forth early, the Spartans ran away with the game in the first half and entered the locker room in full control of the game. They mounted a long 17-2 run midway through the period and shot an impressive 7-of-13 from behind the arc. Jaxon Kohler dropped 12 of his 20 points in the win in the first 20 minutes.
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And not only did they out-rebound Kentucky by 10 in the first half while dominating inside, they shut the Wildcats down offensively, too. Kentucky closed the opening period by shooting just 2-of-18 from the field. The Wildcats managed just 27 points in the first half, which was their lowest-scoring half so far this season.
Michigan State didn’t let up after the break, either, and then expertly fended off an inevitable push from Kentucky that stalled out almost as quickly as it began. The Wildcats used an 11-2 run, capped by a fast-break dunk from Kam Williams, to force a quick Tom Izzo timeout near the midway point of the period. That, however, was as close as they got.
Jesse McCulloch drilled a 3-pointer and then Jeremy Fears found an absolutely wide-open Kohler down low for an easy layup a few minutes later, which immediately put the Spartans back firmly in control. They used an 8-0 run later, which featured a very contested dunk from Cam Ward inside, that got them up by 20. From there, they simply cruised to the 17-point win.
Kohler had five rebounds and shot 8-of-12 from the field while leading Michigan State with his 20 points in the win. Kur Teng added 15 points off the bench, and Trey Fort had 13 points. They finished shooting 51% from the field as a group. They made 11 shots from behind the arc, too, despite only entering the night with 13 total 3-pointers in their previous three games combined.
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Michigan State has both No. 18 North Carolina and No. 5 Duke still ahead this fall before Big Ten play opens, but the Spartans clearly have shown they are capable of holding their own among the best in the country.
Otega Oweh led Kentucky with 12 points and four rebounds, and Denzel Aberdeen added 10 points. He took over for Jaland Lowe, who missed the contest with a shoulder injury. Mouhamed Dioubate had 10 points, too, but he limped off late in the second half with an apparent leg injury. Kentucky shot just 35% from the field as a team and only 7-of-30 from the 3-point line.
Kentucky, which has now fallen into a 20-point hole or greater in each of the ranked matchups it’s had this season, has quite the schedule ahead. The Wildcats will also take on North Carolina, along with No. 13 Gonzaga, Indiana and No. 14 St. John’s before battling in the SEC.
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If Pope can’t turn things around, and soon, they may be in quite the hole before the turn of the year — which would make any hopes of a real NCAA tournament run, something Calipari struggled to pull off at the end, even harder to accomplish.
“If you build an organization the right way, then your identity is not about an individual person. Your identity is about a collective group,” Pope said. “So it shouldn’t matter if we had built a great organization and a great culture, which I’ve clearly failed to do up until today.
“But we won’t fail this season. We just have failed up until today. We will build an organization where we won’t be able to be disrupted every time someone steps in and steps out because we’ll have a team identity, not an individual identity. Until we get there, we’re going to really struggle. That’s my job. That’s why Mitch [Barnhart] brought me here. I’m doing it poorly. I won’t be doing it poorly for much longer.”
