NASHVILLE—With the courage to avoid putting his hood up, Collin Chandler walked to the left side of the table in Bridgestone Arena with a grey Kentucky hoodie draped over him and prepared to face the music.
Chandler and his Kentucky teammates had just wrapped a blowout loss to Gonzaga that was dramatic enough for Kentucky coach Mark Pope to insinuate that Kentucky legend DeMarcus Cousins was right for speaking out against the product Kentucky was putting on the floor. Gonzaga had just taken the will out of this Kentucky team on the way to a 94-59 win at Bridgestone Arena and the effects of the night were entirely visible on Chandler’s face.
“Not good,” Chandler said in regard to that night from down the hall in the Bridgestone Arena locker room after Kentucky’s SEC Tournament over LSU. “Those are just losses that you're going to remember forever. You remember it because you never want to feel it again.”
The generally friendly, outwardly positive Chandler was stuck there staring into the abyss as Pope made a series of declarations, was asked a number of hardballs and was picking up all sorts of heat from anyone with a platform. Pope was the one taking it on the chin, but Kentucky's players were just as much to blame.
This wasn’t the first time, either.
Kentucky’s expensive roster had already erased almost all the good will that they’d earned from the Sweet 16 run they went on in Pope’s first season by that Dec. 5 game. That’s what happens when a program like this loses to Louisville, Michigan State and North Carolina before the holiday season is in full swing.
That’s what happens when perhaps the proudest program in all of college basketball gets embarrassed and stripped of its pride like it was that night. Kentucky never gets completely outclassed like it was that night. Here it was, though. This was its breaking point, and it knew it.
"All the boos that we heard tonight were incredibly well-deserved, mostly for me, and we have to fix it," Pope said after the loss. "We've kind of diminished a little bit into a bad spot right now that we have to dig ourselves out of it, and it's going to be an internal group thing, and we feel the responsibility we have to this university and this fan base."
Gonzaga led that game by 37 points, was up by double digits for the entirety of the second half and did something to this Kentucky team that made just about everyone question where this was all heading.
This was about Gonzaga flexing its muscles, but it was far more about the indication that this had on what this was going to look like for Kentucky the rest of the way.
“Some of those games, we didn’t come to play,” Kentucky forward Malachi Moreno told Basket Under Review. “We didn’t come together and we were trying to play selfish.”
In the days following that Kentucky loss, a video circulated of Kentucky guard Otega Oweh’s supposed lack of effort at times, NBA scouts came out of the woodworks anonymously to criticize him and a number of media members didn’t need to sit behind anything anonymous before criticizing Oweh and this group.
At the time, that felt like the climax of all of this–and maybe it was. But, the basketball gods weren’t done with this Kentucky team yet. Kentucky reeled off four in a row after its trip to Nashville–including a win over Indiana that indicated this wasn’t as dire as it seemed–but a two-game SEC losing streak–which included a loss to Missouri–taught it that it wasn’t exempt from any adversity.
No loss was necessarily off the table. Neither was any injury, as this group learned through Jaland Lowe and Jayden Quaintance’s season-ending injuries. The money clearly hadn’t bought this group any guarantees.
Then, it got its swagger back.
The pitchforks were out. The animosity overcame just about everyone within this rabid Kentucky fanbase and it looked as if Kentucky may have a puncher’s chance at missing the NCAA Tournament if this result held. It was down significantly on the road against LSU and looked to be heading towards peril. All of a sudden, though, it was down 74-73 with a few seconds to play and a prayer left to fulfill.
Chandler fired it from the opposing baseline, found Moreno open on the free throw line by some miracle and gave Moreno a chance to win it if he could get his unorthodox jumper off. By the time Moreno had finished his overhead release, the eerie silence was tangible in LSU’s building and the exuberance radiated off of those on Kentucky’s bench.
The shot and the moment gave this group some confidence, some swagger again. That was the second of five games in which it reeled off and used to get itself back into the standing that indicated it will be a surefire NCAA Tournament team.
“I don't think I had anything to do with the shot,” Moreno said. “I think it just had to do with us coming back down 20 and we got the win. So I think that just shows we can overcome any adversity that comes our way and we can just be the best versions of ourselves.”
Then, it got punched in the face again as it returned to Nashville and played at Memorial Gymnasium. As if it were intending for the sequence in which it beat Tennessee, Texas and Ole Miss before losing to Vanderbilt to be a microcosm of its season, Kentucky was flat out outcompeted against Vanderbilt for 40 minutes.
Vanderbilt was without star guard Duke Miles that day, but it had a chip on its shoulder that Kentucky didn’t as a result of Kentucky’s brand and roster value.
Just two steps forward, one step backward for this Kentucky team. As usual.
“There’s been a lot of ups and downs,” Kentucky forward Mo Dioubate told Basket Under Review. “There’s been a lot of diversity throughout the process, but I learned a lot throughout this process. I never expected it to be easy.”
And easy it has not been. Kentucky enters the Friday of the SEC Tournament with a 21-12 record as well as a 10-8 record in SEC play.
That’s a season below the standard around these parts despite it likely netting Kentucky a seven seed in the NCAA Tournament. This group still played on Wednesday in the SEC Tournament and lost a number of games that this program’s history makes unacceptable.
Perhaps all is well that ends well, though. At least that’s what this group appears to believe.
“We took a lot of adversity throughout the season and especially at the beginning,” Kentucky freshman guard Jasper Johnson told Basket Under Review. “Adversity has definitely helped to prepare us.”
22 million dollars is a figure that’s followed this Kentucky team around since it first gathered on campus in Lexington for the first time. Before this group had any chance to figure this out, it was expected to have it all figured out. It’s college basketball’s most expensive roster so, quite frankly, that’s not all that unrealistic of an expectation.
Even if it’s unfair, signing up to play for Pope’s program–which has so often embraced Kentucky’s rabid fanbase–is signing up to be subjected to all of the fanbases’ opinions. And they have plenty of them. They certainly have this season.
“There’s always pressure,” Johnson said. “The fans expect a lot from us. So, we try to come in and work every day at practice and community service and stuff like that to try to please them and come out and get wins.”
Kentucky’s fanbase has all but turned on this group at times, though. When they’ve sensed poor effort or a general level of play below the standard, they’ve been intentional about avoiding putting up with it.
The primary victims of Big Blue Nation’s wrath appeared to be Oweh and Kentucky big man Brandon Garrison, who scored in double figures just once in Kentucky’s non-conference games. Garrison says he’s been off Twitter and social media as a whole for a long time, which is likely for the best.
“I try not to look at all that stuff,” Garrison told Basket Under Review. “My mom is on my side telling me ‘you’re gonna have a lot of haters when you do bad they’re always gonna have something to say.’ I just blocked it out. I've been playing basketball forever. I know how it goes. So I don't let that bug me at all. But, when you do good they go show love. So it's kind of just like fake love, but I just worry about my teammates and try to get these wins.”
Garrison refers to Kentucky as the “mecca” of college basketball and says it’s different than his Oklahoma State–which is his previous college stop. “Whenyou do good, you get a lot of love,” he says. And when you don’t? “There’s still certain people who love you, you’re playing in front of sellout arenas, the fans travel.”
The ceiling with Kentucky’s fanbase and their buy in is higher than just about any in the country, but seemingly nobody knows the pressure cooker that can be created when results don’t follow their investment. Whether this season has made it worth their while has still yet to be seen.
There Chandler sits at his locker in the basement of Bridgestone Arena in the moments following Kentucky’s win over LSU. As he does, he looks and acts like…himself.
That’s the Collin Chandler that’s affable, not belabored by constant stressors and is the representative of Kentucky that Pope has always envisioned. The last two times Chandler came through Nashville, he was beside himself–and so was this Kentucky team–as he left the building.
This was different. Finally different.
Kentucky had finally won in Nashville. It wasn’t all that pretty, but it had finally done it. That doesn’t mean this is all magically fixed, but it indicates something that Chandler and the rest of this Kentucky team believes to be true; that this group is better for all that it’s been through.
“I think we've grown a lot in that aspect as a team,” Chandler said. “It's been fun to experience. It's not fun to experience adversity, but fun to experience our team come together through the adversity.”
Chandler says he believes Kentucky is more assertive in its ability to flip a switch and make a run rather than just intending to do it. He attributes that to an increased defensive focus and a generally better energy than it’s previously had. Johnson and Moreno say Kentucky’s chemistry is better because of what it’s been through, too.
Talk is cheap, though. It often has been for this Kentucky team–which had preseason expectations that put it in national championship conversations. Time to see if this group has enough in the tank to salvage this–with Kentucky standards in mind–with actions.
“I feel like it's gonna help us in this postseason, just all the stuff we've been through,” Garrison said. “We've been through a lot this year, so I feel like stuff is going to start opening up down the line. I feel like we've just been going through it all, so I feel like something good is gonna happen for us.”
