Turnovers doomed Kentucky vs. Louisville: 'We played extremely poorly'

In some ways, the box score from Kentucky’s 96-88 loss to Louisville is deceiving. The Cats and the Cards shot almost the same percentages from the floor and three-point line, and Kentucky outrebounded Louisville and had more points in the paint, but a few stats stood firmly in the way of victory. Kentucky had 14 assists and 14 turnovers. Louisville had 20 assists to six turnovers. Kentucky’s 14 turnovers led to 19 Louisville points, while the Cards’ six turnovers resulted in 10 points for the Cats. The nine-point differential was one point more than the final margin of victory, eight.

The assist-to-turnover ratio was the difference in the game for Mark Pope.

“We were really sticky with the ball,” Pope said afterward. “The 20 (assists) to 6 (turnovers) compared to the 14 (assists) to 14 (turnovers) tells, really, the whole story of the game. There are a lot of facets to the game where it got to that, but we’re going to lose a 20-6, 14-14 game. We’re just going to lose it, and it’s a credit to Louisville for playing the game the right way. We got punished for not playing it the right way.”

During his postgame conversation with Tom Leach, Pope said his team panicked once Louisville took control of the game midway through the first half.

“So disappointing. Just sometimes, the emotion, the momentum of the game, makes you want to try and do too much. And so we just forced ourselves from the very simple, basic principles that can help us be successful, that we’ve actually had some success at and and a lot of that was credit to Louisville. A lot of it was credit to the deficit we faced so early in the game. Some of it was due to some untimely misses and a little bit of anxiety. But you know, our discipline was, our discipline was poor in terms of our decision making.”

When it came to turning over the ball, Otega Oweh was the biggest offender. Oweh finished with 12 points (4-13 FG, 1-6 3PT, 3-4 FT), 5 rebounds, a team-high 5 turnovers, 2 assists, 2 steals, and a block in 28 minutes. He had the worst plus/minus efficiency number tonight at -16. Pope said that Louisville’s physical play bothered Oweh, but quickly moved on to assist-to-turnover talk. Tom Leach got him to expand a little more on the radio.

“In terms of Otega, they did exactly what we didn’t do. They were great in their gap help. I thought they were elite, and we didn’t make the simple play. We kind of forced the issue at the wrong times, in the wrong ways.”

Louisville led by as many as 20 in the second half, a deficit that Kentucky cut to four with 4:02 remaining; however, in that final four minutes, the Cats scored only four more points. The issues that plagued them throughout the game were on full display in the final stretch, which was especially disappointing when you consider Louisville made its fair share of mistakes at the end as well, missing seven straight free throws in the final minute.

“We played extremely poorly, and credit Louisville for that,” Pope said. “We played extremely poorly, but we do have a competitive group, and we had some interesting new vibe lineups for us in the second half, trying to respond to some things. And I thought I was proud of the guys for competing, but that’s not the standard we have at Kentucky.”