You’ve seen this script before. Kentucky falls behind early, then claws back for a win. Big Blue Nation kept waiting for it to happen Saturday against Ohio State. There was a moment when it looked like the Cats were making their run, but this time they didn’t get over the hump.
The Cats trailed Duke by eight with just over eight minutes to play and won. Kentucky overcame an 18-point second-half deficit to defeat Gonzaga. If they could come from behind against those teams, surely they could rally from a double-digit deficit against Ohio State.
Kentucky cut the 13-point halftime deficit to six points just five minutes into the second half. The tide was turning. The Cats had all the momentum. That’s when Jake Diebler told his team to slow it down.
“We’ve wanted to play with great pace this year, and I think we’re getting better at it, but this game required some specific moments for us to control the pace a little bit more with our offense, and it takes a mature team and really mature backcourt to do that,” Diebler said after the 20-point victory.
“We just never could kind of find the pace of the game,” said Mark Pope. “We had a tough time finding the pace of the game. Bruce Thornton really controlled the entire game the entire time in every single facet of the game. They were comfortable holding the ball, and it was hard for us to manage that, hard for us to guard in space.”
When Kentucky cut it to six, Thornton immediately hit a three. It was one of just four makes by the Buckeyes from downtown all night. They did most of their dirty work by attacking the rim and going to the free throw line. Thornton was 13-14 from the charity stripe, scoring a game-high 30 points.
“I felt like we tried to shrink the game a little bit with some of our offensive possessions and felt like we needed to make them guard longer in the half-court in those moments. Again, that’s a respect to what they’ve been able to do, but I thought we were able, and Bruce Thornton led us in that. We were able to get to the free-throw line some of our own, and we were able to come up with a couple timely offensive rebounds, too,” said Diebler.
“That was kind of the strategy in that moment. We wanted to take our shots early in the clock when we had them, when we had an advantage, but when they were making a run, we felt like we really needed to have some poise, offensive possessions, and I thought our guys executed really well.”
Kentucky got the deficit to single digits one more time with just over four minutes to play. The light at the end of the tunnel was quickly extinguished by a Ques Glover three.
Mark Pope’s team can score a lot of points in a hurry, which is exactly what you need to overcome large deficits. The recipe that worked before did not work against the slow pace of the Buckeyes.
