Mark Pope didn't expect this version of Kentucky, but the Cats just keep winning

This Kentucky team may not look how we thought it would before the season, both in personnel due to injuries, and playing style, but the Cats keep winning. Today’s 72-63 win over Ole Miss was Kentucky’s fifth straight, extending the longest SEC winning streak of the Mark Pope era, and fourth by single digits, the longest such streak since Feb. 2020.

It wasn’t pretty. The Cats held off a second-half Rebel rally thanks in large part to Otega Oweh and Collin Chandler. The former scored 20 of his 23 points in the second half, and the latter added another thrilling moment to a growing list during the winning streak, hitting a three with 47.7 seconds to go to push Kentucky’s lead to six. As Pope joked afterward, this season has not been for the faint of heart.

“It’s fun. All of the cardiologists in BBN are going to be so happy because they are going to have so much extra work from this season. But it’s really fun. Big plays are fun. The drama is fun.”

That’s a lot easier to say after a win, and this one had plenty of drama. Once again, the Cats had several scoring droughts and let Ole Miss hang around most of the second half, the Rebels tying it at 39 with 13:51 to go. It was a back-and-forth battle until the final minute, when Chandler’s three-pointer helped the Cats find some separation. That shot was clutch, but Pope mentioned several other winning plays, ranging from Otega Oweh’s second-half scoring blitz, defensive stands by Chandler and Mo Dioubate, free throws by Malachi Moreno, and Denzel Aberdeen’s rebound and free throws in the final seconds.

“What we have right now is we have guys making winning plays,” Pope told Tom Leach. “So, we have guys that are falling in love with making the dirty, non-scoring, massively important winning plays of the game. We have guys stepping up and doing that all over the place, and it’s why we’ve had so much success in all these close games, and it’s because guys are falling in love with it.”

Earlier this season, Kentucky struggled to close games out, most memorably vs. North Carolina and Missouri. After a few losses during that stretch, Pope talked about how he had to dumb his system down to fit this team’s style. It’s taken some time, but it’s working.

“I think the guys are a little more comfortable with each other. We are staying as simple as we possibly can. Teams are built in different ways. We are trying to stay really, really simple so our guys can go play. Sometimes, you have guys that function a little differently, where you can trick up the game a million different ways, and they like the little nuance part of it. Our team is actually a playmaking team. And so we managed to do it on offense and on defense. It seems like we’ve had a lot of close games right now, which has been really fun. But our players are just stepping up and making big plays.”

The result isn’t always beautiful — even if it always is in Pope’s eyes — but it counts all the same. If this team has to win ugly, at least it’s winning.

“I think every team takes on a unique character,” Pope told Leach. “The specialness of this group might not be what I anticipated, exactly. It might not be exactly that, but there is some real specialness right now, in terms of these guys just gutting it out together, and individual guys just finding some way to impact the game while they’re on the floor.

“All nine guys that we have had a major impact on this game. Every single player that can play on our roster came into this game and had a significant, significant impact, and so that’s actually super cool as a team sport. It’s what we’re doing, and I love it.”

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