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 That was not the case Tuesday.
No. 18 Kentucky played one of its most dominant games of the season
through the first 30 minutes, shooting well and crashing the boards
against an overmatched Ole Miss. The Wildcats then held off the
pesky Rebels' late comeback bid to post an 84-70 win at Tad Smith
Coliseum.
Kentucky bounced back from a 69-59 loss to No. 2 Florida on
Saturday, a game in which the Wildcats played well but simply
couldn't overcome the Gators' dominant second-half offense. Florida
scored on its final 13 possessions.
"Well, the one thing I told them: In the last eight years or so, our
teams have bounced back after a loss by an average of 17 points,"
Kentucky coach John Calipari said. "So you lose a game, you come
back and you beat somebody's brains in. And I wanted to know how we
would do today. And they responded."
Kentucky forward Julius Randle posted game highs with 25 points and
13 rebounds. Guard Aaron Harrison added 17 points for the Wildcats,
guard James Young scored 16, and guard Andrew Harrison had 10.
The Wildcats (20-6, 10-3 SEC) built a second-half lead as large as
22 points, but Ole Miss wasn't quite ready to give up in the final
minutes. With 2:26 to play, guard Jarvis Summers grabbed an
offensive rebound, sprinted the floor and finished a layup through
contact.
He completed the three-point play, and Ole Miss was within seven
points.
With less than two minutes to play, the Rebels climbed within 76-70,
but they did not score again.
Calipari attributed Ole Miss' comeback to his team's youth, citing
as he has all season that his team is the youngest in the country.
Rebels coach Andy Kennedy had a slightly different explanation.
"Kentucky boredom, maybe," he said.
Ole Miss' Marshall Henderson finished with 18 points on 5-of-17
shooting. The free-wheeling guard kept the Rebels (16-10, 7-6) in
the game late, but the deficit was too much to overcome. Summers
scored 22 points, and Ole Miss forward Anthony Perez added 21.
The Rebels suffered their first home loss in SEC play.
Kentucky missed three of its first 10 shots, and Ole Miss led 11-10 — its largest advantage, too — before the Wildcats answered with
16 unanswered points.
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The Wildcats' shots began falling from all over the court. Kentucky
made 10 of its next 11 shots, including five dunks and three
3-pointers.
If it weren't for four straight makes by the Rebels near the end of
that stretch, Kentucky's lead would have been that much bigger.
Still, the Wildcats led 42-25 at halftime.
"It was fun. That's probably how every team wants to play every
game," Aaron Harrison said. "It's not going to happen. You always
have bad games or just don't have the energy there some games and
stuff like that. So that's what we're working on: just having
energy. I think that whole big run just came from energy and
enthusiasm."
The Wildcats relied on their size advantage in an 80-64 win over Ole
Miss in Lexington on Feb. 4, and they went right back into the paint
Tuesday. Seven of Kentucky's 16 made field goals in the first half
were dunks, four on lob passes.
Randle had a double-double in the first half, getting 10 points and
10 rebounds. The freshman now has 14 double-doubles this season.
Henderson scored six points on consecutive possessions early in the
first half — a three-point play and a deep 3-pointer — but was
held scoreless the rest of the half.
Coming out at the opening tip with a bang was one thing Kentucky
focused on all week in practice, Randle said, and even if the focus
waned in the game's final minutes, the initial flash was bright
enough to produce a win.
"We had two days where all we talked about, Coach said it, was like
chemistry, energy," Randle said. "We saw in the film, the last 10
minutes of the (Florida) game. We played really well the first 30
minutes versus Florida, and the last 10 minutes our chemistry and
our energy dropped. Maybe it was fatigue. Who knows? But we couldn't
have that. So we were excited to get back on the court and show what
we can do."
NOTES: The Wildcats improved to 102-13 in the all-time series
against Ole Miss. ... With Tuesday's win, Kentucky's John Calipari
posted 20 victories for the 20th consecutive season as a coach at
Massachusetts, Memphis and Kentucky. ... The Rebels lost for the
fourth time in five games. ... Kentucky returns home to play LSU on
Saturday. Ole Miss plays host to No. 2 Florida on Saturday.
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