There was no hope for West Virginia to stop Kentucky from 37-0.
The No. 1 Kentucky Wildcats are now 37-0, the most recent victory a 78-39 thrashing over the fifth seed in the Midwest Region, a helpless, poor pile of laundry that once was a talented West Virginia Mountaineers team. Kentucky will play the No. 3 Notre Dame Fighting Irish on Saturday for a trip to the Final Four.
Kentucky opened the game on an 18-2 run, which was all you needed to hear to know about the outcome of this game. But Kentucky had won 36 other games before it made the Sweet 16; so little of the essence of the Wildcats is found in the fact that they won another game. The 18-2 run was all the Wildcats needed to advance, but it didn't define the game.
What did define the game? West Virginia shot 5 of 26 in the first half and didn't make its first field goal in the second half until the 11:40 mark. One of those first-half misses is pictured below, when Willie Cauley-Stein and Trey Lyles simultaneously blocked one of BillyDee Williams' shots.
That ball rolled out of bounds off Williams, because Kentucky is science fiction.
Kentucky also got bored on offense and, at one point, dunked on itself.
Kentucky did weather one brief scare early in the second half when Aaron Harrison appeared to jam a finger on his non-shooting hand, and he sprinted off the court and into the tunnel with a trainer to tend to it. But he quickly returned to the bench. It was diagnosed as a sprained finger according to CBS' telecast, but he re-entered the game several minutes later.
★★★
3 things we learned
1. Kentucky isn't perfect, but everyone else is running out of time. Every so often, the Wildcats have played a game this season that begs the question: Who in the world could beat them? Thursday was one of those nights. The win over West Virginia was much more reminiscent of the 72-40 win over the Kansas Jayhawks in November and the 83-44 win over UCLA in December in which the Bruins scored seven points in the first half than it was the overtime win at home over Ole Miss and double overtime win at Texas A&M. So yes, the Wildcats are great, but they've also shown they aren't invincible. West Virginia's pressure defense was supposed to disrupt Kentucky's offense, right? Instead, Kentucky led 18-2 before you knew it and did not have a single turnover in the backcourt against the press all night.
2. John Calipari doesn't stop coaching when his team is up 30. This isn't news for those who have watched Kentucky all year, because Calipari has been in this situation a few times this season. But as Kentucky's lead climbed from 20 to 30 and finally near 40, Cal was still coaching his players hard. There are lessons to be learned when playing organized basketball, one may posit, and a lot of those lessons are learned the hard way by losing games. Kentucky hasn't done that yet, so alternative methods of lesson-learning must be discovered.
3. Notre Dame miiiight not be the best matchup to pull the upset. Notre Dame is a fantastic offensive team, as was displayed earlier Thursday when Jerian Grant was limited mostly to dishing the ball and Notre Dame still put up 81 points on Wichita State. But Notre Dame is undersized—compared to Kentucky, isn't everyone?—and the Wildcats are No. 1 in college basketball in adjusted defensive efficiency, and their length at all positions will disrupt Notre Dame on the perimeter in a way Wichita State couldn't.
Source SBNation.com - All Posts http://ift.tt/1CfBei8
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