Keion Brooks: Kentucky 'complacent' in recent games

It’s no secret that Kentucky’s intensity has plummeted since the season-opening win over Michigan State. Most of that is due to injuries, but part of it is also the freshmen getting used to being everybody’s Super Bowl, to borrow a phrase from John Calipari. Today, Keion Brooks told reporters that the team knows they must get back to playing with the same intensity they had to start the season.

“We need to learn to play again to our standard. I feel like lately, we have been playing to the level of our competition and not playing like we were in the beginning of the season, especially in the first two games against Michigan State and EKU. In those two games, we came out with a mentality that we wanted to get stops and win in transition and just kept raising our level of intensity. I feel like since then we’ve been letting go and we got to get back to that.”

“I think to start off the season the first games the defense was tremendous. We came out with a fire and a passion to get stops. I feel like we kind of got complacent.”

Assistant coach Joel Justus said that Calipari has said as much in the locker room, encouraging his players to play with the same “reckless abandon” that their opponents do.

“I think often times teams coming in, especially in November and December – and you might even be able to extend that throughout the season – teams really seem to play with a reckless abandon, really like they have nothing to lose,” Justus said. “That’s a skill that these guys are starting to figure out. It’s something that Coach has addressed. I think he wants our team to play a little bit that way, like we have nothing to lose.”

Kentucky learned that lesson the hard way in the loss to Evansville, but, plagued by injuries, also allowed Utah Valley to stay in the game almost until the very end.

“It’s tough,” Justus said. “It’s tough to play here. It’s tough to play in front of 20,000 folks that are challenging you and cheering for you. These guys, this is new for them too. It’s a new team. I think when you talk about the kind of obstacles that we’ve had to go through in practice with guys being injured, sometimes the games now are different than practice. Whereas typically you’re able to have your practices look like the games or emulate the games and sometimes be tougher, and I think that’s why our teams have been good here and great here because the practices sometimes have been tougher than the games. Until we can get back to that where we have a full complement and our full roster, I think we’re going to take some learning opportunities in the games.”

It’s not clear when Kentucky will be back to a full roster; however, Brooks’ awareness — both of his performance and the team’s — is encouraging. In the last two games, he’s averaged only 5.5 points and 4 rebounds. Dunks like this show how dangerous he can be, but they need to happen more often, especially against slower, less athletic opponents:

Keion Brooks drives baseline and drops the hammer. pic.twitter.com/07ctZUGCZu

— TheCatsPause247 (@TheCatsPause247) November 19, 2019

“I’m not where I want to be,” he admitted. “I always have the mentality that I’ve got room to get better and there’s things I can learn and improve on throughout the game. The minutes that I have, I feel like I did a pretty decent job of trying to make an impact for the time I was out there. I’m going to practice and keep going up and talking to Coach Cal to see what I can do to help our team get better.”