WATCH: Mark Pope after Kentucky's loss to Louisville

by: Tyler Thompson11 hours agoMrsTylerKSR

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Mark Pope didn’t speak long about Kentucky’s 96-88 loss to Louisville. To him, there was really only one story, and that was the discrepancy between the teams’ assist-to-turnover ratios. It was issue number one on a disappointing night for the program, one which Pope said was unacceptable.

“We played extremely poorly, and credit Louisville for that. 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.”

Pope only spoke for five minutes in the media room, and the players did not field any questions. Pope gave plenty of praise to Mikel Brown Jr. and Ryan Conwell, who scored a combined 53 points and exposed what we thought was an elite defense.

“The transition got us out of our gap help, and we never recovered. We kind of lost the discipline of our defensive principles, which was incredibly disappointing for us, but if you do, and you’re playing against talented players, then that’s what you’re going to see. So we were late to everything. Again, credit to them. We were on our heels on the defensive end the whole night, and that’s a problem that we’ll fix. We’ll get better.”

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Pope also complimented Kam Williams’ performance off the bench. The Tulane transfer gave the Cats a jolt of energy late in the game with five points and four rebounds in 12 minutes. Thanks to him and Collin Chandler, Kentucky was able to cut Louisville’s lead from 20 to four; however, they could not complete the comeback.

“It was a lot of stress for us tonight, and we did not respond to it well.”

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