Kentucky is on the verge of making history. Or more accurately, to make more history.
This 2015 Wildcats’ team is in position to do something no other has within the considerable the Big Blue book of basketball annals. That is, to run the table, to win them all, to achieve perfection.
To go 40-and-oh and win a national championship.
The Wildcats got a step closer to that Utopian achievement on Sunday they won their 28th SEC tournament championship 78-65 over Arkansas at Bridgestone Arena. Their 46th regular-season title came eight days ago.
Now 34-0 — the best single-season mark in the history of the storied program – Kentucky received the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA tournament, as expected. And now nothing less than perfection is expected – or will be accepted — by the Big Blue Nation.
“My concern right now is just making sure we’re in a great frame of mind,” coach John Calipari said shortly after the Wildcats were placed in the Midwest Region. “…”I was good with whatever they gave us. I feel like I have the best players and the best team.”
Putting all this history into any kind of perspective is a virtual impossibility for the young gladiators that are slaying all these opponents for Kentucky. What the Big Blue Nation has done before this very moment is immaterial to them. What it can possibly achieve in the grand context of sport is not something they contemplate.
Asked what he knows about other great Kentucky teams and where this group might stack up this among them, junior Willie Cauley-Stein shrugged.
“I couldn’t tell you anything,” the 7-foot forward from Olathe, Kan. said about Kentucky basketball history. “For real.”
Certainly Cauley-Stein —who scored 42 points, pulled down 21 rebounds and blocked seven shots on the way to MVP honors in Nashville — can recite who are some of the Wildcats’ previous national champions teams. Or maybe at least the last one.
“I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head,” he said unapologetically.
Of course not. That’s ancient history, going all the back to 2012.
No, this 2015 Kentucky squad is all about the here and now. And that has given it plenty to focus on. While the Wildcats have won eight national championships as a program, it’s just this one about which these players are concerned.
“For us, we just worry about the next game,” said Karl-Anthony Towns, the latest in long line of tremendously impactful freshmen for the Wildcats. “For you to be historic you have to keep winning every next game. So we just worry about what we can do to contribute to the game and for each other.”
If that line sounds a bit rehearsed, it’s because it is. If Calipari has done anything great for this team – and clearly the SEC’s coach of the year has done a lot right to this point – he has gotten them to buy into “eliminating the noise” and keeping the focus their focus on the small picture.
That has become increasingly difficult as the locomotive that is Kentucky basketball and its boxcars of expectations has cleared another summit and is barreling downhill into the NCAA Tournament. The next leg of their journey starts next door in Louisville, where it will be easy to turn the inside of the KFC Yum! Center all blue.
Not that it has been a problem to do anywhere. The Wildcats’ painted downtown Nashville and Bridgestone Arena blue this week. And everywhere they went, on the sidewalks of Broadway and hotel elevators, they’d say to each other “40-and-oh.”
That will be Kentucky’s record if they can take care of the next six in the NCAA Tournament. If they can pull it off, they will become the first power conference team to go undefeated since Indiana Hoosiers did it in 1976 and finished 32-0.
“We know how hard it’s going to be,” Calipari said. “Every game we play is going to be a war… It’s going to be a hard bracket. We know it.”
It wasn’t that uncommon for the pre-1980s teams to go undefeated. UCLA went 60-0 over two seasons from 1971 to ‘73 and ended up winning 88 in a row in all. But not many teams since that ‘76 Bobby Knight squad have had the opportunity to run the table.
A few years later, an Indiana State Sycamores team led by Larry Bird had a shot but lost to Magic Johnson’s Michigan State squad in the championship game to finish 33-1. And Jerry Tarkenian’s UNLV Runnin’ Rebels were expected to before getting tripped up by Duke 79-77 in the 1991 semifinals to finish 34-1.
And then there was Wichita State last year. The Shockers entered the tournament undefeated but received what many believed was an unfair draw. And wouldn’t you know it? They faced eighth-seeded Kentucky in the second round in St. Louis and were bounced, 78-76, heading back to Kansas with a 35-1 record.
But that team had its flaws. By all indications, this Kentucky team doesn’t, or at least none that are readily apparent.
In all, there are nine McDonald’s All-Americans on the roster, and Calipari generally plays them in platoons. And when Kentucky shows any kind of struggle, he mixes and matches lineups until he can find a combination that clicks. With 10 players at 6-foot-6 or taller, only the NBA’s Portland Trailblazers have a bigger team in all of basketball.
No college team has been able to match-up. However, quite a few have hung with them from time-to-time. The Georgia Bulldogs, which led Kentucky by six points with five minutes to play, are among the five SEC teams that lost by single digits.
Where this 2015 team fits among Kentucky’s greatest teams is a hotly-debated topic. Even the legendary Oscar Combs, who has covered Wildcats’ basketball for 50 years, has a hard time coming to grips with what he’s witnessing.
“Where does this team stack up? You’ve got to have a little bit of time,” said Combs, who calls the 2012 squad the best he’s ever seen. “Most of all these guys with the exception of Cauley-Stein are sophomores or freshmen. So they’ve got the potential. … I’m not ready to buy into 40-0, but it’d be hard to go against that.”
Said Cauley-Stein: “I try not to think about it. I just try to live in the moment. Hopefully, it happens, and I can look back at it and say, ‘dang, we went 40-0.’ Right now, I’m just trying to get better and make sure everybody else is on the same page so we win.”
So far, so very, very good.
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