Rick Pitino aware his team doesn't match up well with Kentucky

@MrsTylerKSR

You know how I know Rick Pitino is nervous about Wednesday's game? He's actually telling the truth. After his team's 87-56 win over Eastern Kentucky on Saturday, Pitino admitted to Bob Valvano on his postgame show that Louisville has "major" matchup problems with Kentucky, particularly at guard. As De'Aaron Fox and Malik Monk have shown us time and time again, Kentucky can burn you in transition, and even Pitino couldn't help but gush about Fox, whom he also recruited. “Well, they’re a great transition team," Pitino told reporters in the postgame presser. "I’m not in the NBA anymore, but they’ve got three guys, if I was still drafting, I’d put those guys, I think I’d take their point guard maybe number one or two in the draft. I recruited him. I love him as a person. I love him as a player. They’ve got three guys, and that’s not their only three players, that are probably going to go top 10 in the draft. They’re very well-coached. They play excellent defense. They shoot it at certain positions. It’s going to be a really tough game, but the whole four games is going to be a tough stretch. We could go four-and-0 or 0-and-four, who knows.”

Louisville plays Kentucky, Virginia, Indiana, and Notre Dame over the next few weeks, which Pitino said is the toughest stretch he's faced since coaching the Knicks.

"This team's going to be very good toward the middle of the season, but we don't have time to wait until the middle of the season because the next four games are the toughest stretch I've had since I've been coaching, with the exception of when I coached the Knicks," Pitino said.

Pitino says he wants his team to run with Kentucky, but even he knows that may be asking too much. "What's impressive about them is that they pass the ball up the floor so quickly and then they finish so quickly. They're great runners, so we wanted to play good transition defense to get ready for that, but we didn't look ahead." Bring it.