but maybe your basketball knowledge is superior to his as well.

Cal has twice made the point in public, and taken responsibility for it. Yes, it can be remedied, but Cal’s point and mine is simply that this team is not where it should be in terms of conditioning at this point in the season, and it is a glaring (and inexcusable) weakness that must be addressed if we are to achieve the ridiculously lofty goals some of you have assumed we will. As Pitino often rightly said, conditioning is the one thing you have absolute control over, and that is simply a question of discipline. We’ll soon see whether our Golden Boys have discipline to go along with their talent.

As far as whether “last year’s team wasn’t really all that bad,” I would suggest you not drink the revisionist Koolaid. Before BCG’s descent into madness that 22-win team was at one point 16-4 and ranked in the top 25, and rightly so. Of the three teams we played in the Pomeroy National Top Ten, we beat one (#9 West Virginia) and lost to another by a bucket (#4 Louisville). The other team beat us at their place, then went on to become National Champions (#1 UNC).

That team beat a ranked Tennessee team at Tennessee by 18 points. That team beat seven teams that ended the year with more than 20 wins, including the win over an outstanding West Virginia team that ended the year at Number 9 in the Pomeroy rankings.

In fact, until February hit, that team had only six losses, and five of those came from RANKED teams, including the eventual national champion, who beat us at their home dome, as I noted above.

Five of last year’s eventual losses were to ranked teams by an average of 3 points. We lost to South Carolina by 1, to LSU and Louisville by 3, to Mississippi by 5, and Miami by 6. A basket or two in any of those games at the right time (Jodie and DeAndre played uncharacteristically poorly in many of our losses) and this team would have been in the NCAA tournament pushing for the 30 wins 40YearCatFan had predicted for us.

Them’s the facts, friends, and no amount of hand wringing or revisionist history will take them away. Yes, BCG did go nuts there after we got nationally ranked, and hurt Jodie’s feelings, and put Josh in the toilet, and let DeAndre coach for a while, and yes, he totally destroyed team morale. I don’t know whether he was hitting the bottle, or just feeling the glory a little too much, but it was his descent into madness that eventually ran this team out of contention and gave us that 3-8 stretch that is coloring the memory of the marginal Cat fans. To one with true basketball knowledge, though, it remains a fact that, as I said, “last year’s team wasn’t really all that bad.”

I am not a BCG apologist, nor do I say Tubby should have been cut any more slack after ten years without a Final Four, but let’s call a spade a spade when we speak of our past teams. Those boys put up with hell from the fans, from the coach, and from themselves, and before we just blithely accept the ESPN pop culture assessment that UK sucked last year, and now they’re back, we should acknowledge their actual performance and accomplishments, which, though not up to acceptable UK standards, really weren’t all that bad.

After 2 games, Perry is perfect from the field (5 for 5, including a three-pointer), and 10 of 11 from the free throw line.

Perry: 19 points in 30 minutes
PPat: 18 points in 57 minutes

It helps you try to feel good about Tubby again.

If I’m not mistaken, didn’t we lead the conference in FG% offense and defense??? That’s pretty solid for any team. The glaring hole in the BCG era was lack of formidable point guard play (ironically enough, BCG came in as the guy who turned Law into a lottery pick, but anyways). Turnovers killed us last year. I believe if we reduced our turnovers by 33% last year, we would have been at least a #4 seed in the NCAA last year.

Also, last year, parody in college basketball reigned supreme. Without 1 dominant, top-10 caliber team in the SEC last year, everyone’s strength of schedule suffered. If you look at the matchups during the last regular season, SEC teams were competitive with the other major conferences. The reason no SEC team made it to the sweet 16 last year was because of the low seedings they received.

I honestly thought last year’s team was better than the team before last.

Told him he needs to demand the ball, and put himself in a position to deserve it.

Pat said, “My teammates were getting the job done, I don’t care to pad my stats.”

Cal told him, “You are the star of this team, so don’t be bashful just because your teammates are doing a good job.”

I think Cal wants it for Pat, nor for the team necessarily, because certainly Orton, Cousins, and Stevenson are playing great big man ball.

Good for Cal. He will get great play out of Pat when Pat’s humility won’t force him to do it.

Perry has been outstanding in particular.