Kentucky basketball slows Florida: Wildcats hand Gators first loss of season in SEC opener

Posted by Admin January 4, 2025 Basketball

LEXINGTON — En route to a 13-0 start this season, Florida basketball leaned on a simple formula. Armed with the best rebounding team in the land, the Gators used their dominance on the glass to jump-start offense, averaging nearly 20 points per game in transition, which ranked No. 2 nationally entering Saturday.

Matching up with Kentucky in a contest that tipped off before noon Saturday, Florida still had its way on the boards, winning the rebounding battle 38-30.

But the Wildcats won the game.

Slowing the Gators’ fast-break attack to a crawl, the Wildcats earned a 106-100 victory at Rupp Arena in the SEC opener for both clubs.

“If you guys didn’t have fun tonight, you should quit right now and find a new job,” UK coach Mark Pope said. “That was just an elite-level (game). Physicality. Bloodbath. Competitive. Just incredible performance after incredible performance going down the line. A great game.”

The tussle between ranked teams — Kentucky was No. 11 in the USA TODAY Coaches Poll, six spots behind No. 5 Florida — also marked the league debut for Pope, in his first-year guiding his alma mater.

The Wildcats (12-2, 1-0 SEC) made their coach’s maiden conference clash count. Even if starting his SEC career with a win hadn’t sunk in less than half an hour after the buzzer sounded.

“The one thing that you learn when you’ve been coaching for a little while is that it just really doesn’t have much to do with us,” he said. “This is about this community and these players growing and learning, and the fact that we get to be here to bear witness is unbelievable. It’s really special.”

Handing the Gators (13-1, 0-1) their first loss of the season — it had been the Gators’ second-best start, trailing only the 17-0 beginning in 2005-06; that squad went on to capture the school’s first national title in men’s hoops — was a testament to the Wildcats bottling up the visitors in transition. Florida managed just three fast-break points in the first 39 minutes of Saturday’s game, scoring five more in the final 15 seconds as it attempted to engineer an epic rally after trailing by 10 points at halftime.

Todd Golden deemed the fast-break figure “a little bit misleading,” advising observers to dig deeper.

“I mean, we scored 100 points,” said Golden, in his third season as Florida’s coach. “We were getting some stuff in early offense that might not have been the first five or six seconds of the (shot) clock, but maybe it was the 10 or 11 mark, just getting downhill. … I’m disappointed we weren’t better in that regard. But the overall, big picture offensively wasn’t the issue. I thought we played definitely well enough on that end to win.”

The Gators’ miniscule transition tally wasn’t solely due to the Wildcats’ defense.

It’s because UK’s offense forced Florida to inbound the ball so frequently after another bucket.

Kentucky knocked down 57.8% (37 for 64) of its shot attempts, the best showing by a Florida foe this season. The previous high mark was North Carolina, which made 45.8% (33 for 72) of its tries in a 90-84 loss to Florida last month in Charlotte, North Carolina.

“When you’re pulling the ball out of the net a lot,” Golden said, “it’s gonna be really hard to get out and get in transition and play a fast break.”

The Wildcats converted nearly half of their 3-point attempts Saturday, finishing at 48% (14 of 29). No player had a more prominent role in that long-distance prowess than 3-point extraordinaire Koby Brea, who sank seven of the nine triples he shot. Part of an 8-for-11 effort overall, Brea ended with a team-high 23 points off the bench. Teammates Andrew Carr and Jaxson Robinson had two 3-pointers apiece.

In all, six Wildcats notched a double-figure point total: Brea, guards Lamont Butler (19) and Otega Oweh (16) and forward Amari Williams (15), followed by the aforementioned Carr and Robinson, who each had 14.

“I feel like anyone can have a good night (offensively), especially with the amount of time that we have,” Williams said. “It’s just tough for other teams to know who is going to have that night and how they are going to guard us.”

UK now prepares for its first SEC road contest of the season. Kentucky heads to Athens, Georgia, to face Georgia on Tuesday.

Game time is set for 7 p.m. at Stegeman Coliseum.

This story will be updated.

Reach Kentucky men’s basketball and football reporter Ryan Black at rblack@gannett.com and follow him on X at @RyanABlack.