Kentucky 96, Western Ontario 68:  Postmortem

Congratulations to the Western Ontario Mustangs for a good effort for such a young team with so little practice, and our thanks go out to them for welcoming the Kentucky Wildcats and Big Blue Faithful to Canada.

Kentucky once again prevailed, this time without the services of Terrence Jones.  As UK was severely short of size, Darrius Miller at 6'8" was pressed into service at the post when Josh Harrellson wasn't in, and he performed admirably in that role, as well as his normal role of swing forward.

This game was interesting in that the Mustangs were able to hang pretty close in the first half, even grabbing a couple of leads in the game with good ball movement and excellent perimeter shooting.  But the second half, much like last night, was a different story.

It's hard to take these types of exhibitions too seriously, but they do offer a look inside the fundamental skills of the newer Kentucky players, and demonstrate areas in which returning players have at least superficially improved.  One thing I thought was interesting in this game was a bit of a revelation about conditioning.  It seemed that Brandon Knight is one of the best conditioned athletes on the floor, as was Doron Lamb and Darius Miller.  The rest of the players for Kentucky seemed to show varying degrees of a lack of conditioning, including DeAndre Liggins.

To be fair, Liggins problems could have come from the hard knock to his right knee he took early in the second half.  He just wasn't the same player after that, but he did play at full speed, and I wonder if it was the conditioning or the bruise that was the greater factor.  I'm hoping it was the former.

Anyway, here are my observations:

• Doron Lamb reminds me of B.J. Armstrong.  He has almost exactly the same game, and boy, he was all over the place tonight.  What I really like about Lamb is his commitment to defense, and I think Calipari's going to like that as well.
• Brandon Knight had a fairly difficult first half scoring, but he did a much better job as a point guard than he did last night.  Knight still gambles too much, leading to mismatches and easy buckets.
  
• Darius Miller was simply the best player on the floor tonight.  He created offense from defense, he made perimeter shots, inside shots, and even thunder tip-dunks.  Darius played above the rim, and was really good in almost every aspect.
• DeAndre Liggins was, as someone said in the Open Game Thread, inspirational -- especially in the first half.  In the second half, he was not nearly as effective, and that knock on the knee might have been why.
• Jon Hood had good moments, and bad ones.  He's still out of position too much on defense, and his shooting is really inconsistent -- he made a couple of great threes, and missed a couple of wide open looks badly.
• Stacey Poole played the same way tonight as last night.  He hustled, he defended, he ran the floor, but he is a year or so away from being a major contributor.
• Josh Harrellson had a good game and bad game all in one.  He did some good things, but he mishandled some good passes and generally had lousy footwork in the post.  He had his moments, but they were too few.
• Jarrod Polson played.  He played hard, and it didn't do too bad, but he was almost invisible to anyone not looking for him.

Overall, it was not bad.  I actually think that as a team, they played better tonight -- less selfish, more team oriented.  Brandon Knight really has to learn to give up the ball to his teammates more, and not take the first open shot he gets.  I saw a lot of high school in his game tonight, although he did make an effort to set up his teammates more, an effort which was rewarded by more than twice the number of assists he had in the first game.

Ultimately, the only thing that bothered me about this game was the fact that the team took too many quick shots, and had stretches where their defense was really bad.  But they also had stretches where their defense was very good, so I guess it evens out in the end.  It is early, very early, after all.

I will give Kentucky credit for playing a reasonably physical game considering their lack of size and finesse orientation.  That was welcome, as was the better overall team passing.  I was disappointed in the shot selection and the occasional lack of defensive intensity, but overall, who can complain about a 28 point win?