Kentucky escaped Northern Arizona with a win, but the box score left a bruise.
Alex Wilkins saved the night with a last-second three-pointer, and that was enough to keep the Wildcats from taking a damaging loss. Still, the way Kentucky handled the glass made the whole thing feel a lot uglier than a simple close call.
Northern Arizona beat Kentucky on the boards 32-20, and the most jarring number was tucked inside that total: the Lumberjacks grabbed eight offensive rebounds, while Kentucky managed just one. That lone offensive board didn’t even come until the second half. Northern Arizona turned its extra chances into 11 second-chance points, and for a team that entered the game 0-3 and ranked No. 299 in KenPom, that’s a rough look for a Kentucky roster with a $20 million+ price tag.
The rebounding issues were obvious while the game was happening, but they hit even harder after the final buzzer when Jack “Goose” Givens weighed in on UK’s official postgame radio show. The Kentucky legend sounded stunned by what he saw from the Wildcats on the boards and made clear he thought Northern Arizona controlled the game in a way it should not have.
“This team should not be good enough to force me to play any way other than what I want to play, and that’s what it comes down to. We have to believe in ourselves.
We have to, but this team is not going to come in here and dictate to me how I’m gonna play? I mean, and now I know it happens sometimes that way, but that’s the attitude you have to have.
You can’t allow it.”
Givens, who led Kentucky to a national championship in 1978, went even further when talking about the Northern Arizona side of things.
“I know men are not supposed to cry. I get all of that stuff, but if I’m in that locker room right now, I’m shedding tears, man, because I deserve to win this. Fortunately, we have the gods of Kentucky basketball floating around Rupp Arena, and we worked out a way to win this thing with their help, but if I’m in their locker room, man, I mean, there’s no way I’m supposed to lose.”
Mark Pope didn’t sugarcoat it either. After the game, he told Tom Leach, “Listen, it’s just completely unacceptable for us to be a one-offensive-rebound team in a game,” Pope said.
“It’s just, I mean, that’s bordering on insanity. That just cannot happen.
It is completely unacceptable.”
Milan Momcilovic also addressed the problem on the postgame show and pointed to Kentucky’s defensive scrambling as part of the issue.
“I feel like right now we’re in a lot of rotations on the defensive end. So, when we’re in rotations, we’re scrambling around.
They usually have a couple of free runners, so I feel like we’ve got to guard the ball a little better, and that’ll lead to just a man-on-man box-out. Right now, they’re getting a lot of free runners, which is big to them.
Getting a lot of offensive rebounds, and then on our side of the floor, I think we had two offensive rebounds tonight, and they out-rebounded us, so I think that’s obviously not where we want to be. That’s a bad look, but I think that’s something we definitely got to clean up as the rebounding.”
When Goose corrected him and pointed out Kentucky actually had only one offensive rebound, Momcilovic didn’t push back.
“That’s probably right then.”
There’s plenty for Kentucky to clean up, but the rebounding has to be the first fix.
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