The stats from Kentucky's loss to Gonzaga will make you angry

by: Zack Geoghegan9 hours agoZGeogheganKSR

Well, that sucked. Like, that really sucked…

There’s not much to say about Kentucky’s 94-59 loss to Gonzaga from Friday night in Nashville. So instead of going on my soapbox, I’ll let the numbers do the talking for me. Unfortunately, there are a ton of bad ones to sift through. We’ll start with the opening of the game, when Kentucky missed its first 10 field goal attempts of the night. ESPN showed a graphic after the 10th miss that stated the Wildcats hadn’t done that to start any game over the last eight seasons.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, though. Kentucky shot just 26.7 percent from the field and 7-34 from deep against the Bulldogs.

UK statistician Corey Price has a handful of bad stats that will make your blood boil. 20 first-half points for Kentucky marked its fewest since scoring 18 against Missouri in Feb. 2018. The Wildcats’ nine made two-point field goals for the entire game were the fewest since also making just nine two-pointers in March 2019 against Tennessee. And oh by the way, Gonzaga’s Graham Ike connected on 10 two-pointers all by himself on Friday night.

To pile on the bad news, Kentucky’s 35-point loss is tied for the third-worst defeat in program history during the shot clock era (1985). Only the 55-point loss to Kansas in 1989 and the 41-point loss to Vanderbilt in 2008 were worse.

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UK is now 1-12 in the Mark Pope era when trailing by 12 or more points at any point in a game. The lone win actually came against Gonzaga last season. That means, in over a quarter of the games Kentucky has played under Pope, the Wildcats have trailed by at least a dozen points — not good! On top of that, of the four games since the start of the shot clock era that UK has trailed by at least 23 points going into halftime, two of them have happened under Pope.

It’s hard to envision how Kentucky can turn this ship around, even if the roster ends up being fully healthy sooner rather than later. We have collected enough data to see that this is not a good basketball team right now.