MILWAUKEE — There’s an action dubbed “Chicago” featured in almost every college basketball offense. It’s a simple pindown into a dribble handoff — and it’s far more difficult for a defense to navigate than your garden-variety pick-and-roll. Everybody does it. Kentucky just does it better.
Mark Pope and the Wildcats are Sweet 16-bound after Sunday’s gutsy 84-75 win over sixth-seeded Illinois thanks, in part, to that exact “Chicago” action that Kentucky just kept executing at a high level. The ‘Cats scored 14 points directly off dribble handoffs, its most in any single game this year against a high-major club, per Synergy. It could not have come at a better time.
“What makes us special is all the little things that make a huge difference,” forward Andrew Carr said in the postgame locker room, with a beaming smile across his face. “Spacing in the corner. Screening really hard. Depending on how the defense wants to guard us, that decides what we’re going to get for the night. Regardless of how teams guard us, we always have an answer.”
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When Kentucky noticed Illinois was choosing to defend the Chicago action with its usual drop coverage, the ‘Cats knew the sweet-shooting Koby Brea was going to be a huge part of the solution. Boy, did he deliver with a season-best 23 points.
Sunday was the masterpiece of the vision that Mark Pope had when he took the Kentucky job last April and started building a team from scratch. Big man Amari Williams is the playmaking center you need to slip backdoor darts. Carr is the catch-and-shoot marksman you need at the 4 to stretch the floor and drag a would-be shot-blocker away from the rim. Otega Oweh is the big, strong, physical wing who can build a head of steam and barrel toward the rim. Brea is the terrifying shooter who demands attention.
All of those pieces played a critical role in sending Kentucky back to the Sweet 16 for the first time since 2019. Kentucky scored a scintillating 1.27 points per possession in a dominant second half. It also required a bit of foresight. When he was at Dayton last year, Brea rarely was utilized in handoffs. Kentucky has turned him into one of the most potent bucket-getters off handoffs in the country.
Oh, and you need Lamont Butler.
“He’s LaMarch, man,” Oweh said. “He’s our guy. He’s going to go out there and play hard and we follow his lead.”
The veteran point guard had a heavy wrap on his left shoulder, but it was a bit less restrictive than his normal armor. Pope has dubbed him the “one-armed bandit.” That taped-up man was at his best in his 12th (!) NCAA Tournament start of his career. He’s best known, of course, for the buzzer-beater to beat Florida Atlantic in the 2023 Final Four, advancing San Diego State to the title game against UConn.
Butler, who transferred to Kentucky this offseason, delivered 14 points and five assists while splashing multiple 3-pointers in a game for the first time in two months. He pestered Illinois freshman Kasparas Jakucionis all night long, including poking away his third steal of the game and finding teammate Brandon Garrison for a back-breaking layup with just over four minutes to go to snuff an Illinois rally.
“That was a massive play,” Pope said. “It was unbelievable. He came from clear across the court. It was a brilliant play by him.”
Butler is now an incredible 9-3 in the NCAA Tournament.
“He’s such a quick study and a big-moment guy,” Pope said. “I felt confident he was going to be special. It doesn’t always happen that way, but he was really special tonight. My goodness, he was really special for us and important. And he’s a winner. We said it since day one, guys, we were really blessed to have a winner walk through our are doors at the University of Kentucky that cares about winning. I don’t know if I’ve ever coached a player that is more desperate to not let down his team.”
On the other side of the aisle, Illinois bemoaned those “self-inflicted wounds” that were a stumbling block in November and the demise in March. The Illini coughed it up 14 times and Kentucky turned it into 26 game-changing points.
“I still feel like we’re the better team,” junior wing Tre White said. “We play harder. We’re more talented and deep in our bench. But it just made it an uphill battle giving them leak-out layups. It’s a hard pill to swallow. It’s kinda now all hitting me that it’s all over.”
But Illinois couldn’t find enough answers offensively against a Kentucky defense that might rank outside the top-40 nationally but is a completely different unit with an active Butler.
“He’s the best defender in the country,” Ansley Almonor said. “When he’s healthy and ready to play like that, it’s so hard to score on us. It’s hard for them to get up in their stuff because he is pressuring them so much.”
That was also part of the calculus when Pope was building this team. Butler was one of the best defenders in the country at San Diego State. Oweh showed all the defensive tools to be special at Oklahoma last year. Carr was a rock-solid defender at Wake Forest. Williams isn’t a perfect defender, but he was the three-time CAA Defensive Player of the Year for a reason.
But injuries ravaging the club most of the season, Kentucky could rarely find cohesiveness defensively. At one point, the ‘Cats rated outside the top-100 nationally in defensive efficiency. You can win a few games in March with a defense that poor but you can’t win six straight. That defense and this defense are polar opposites.
“I haven’t dug into the data, so somebody check for me, but I have never seen a team that has gone from 112 to 45 in the last six weeks of the season,” Pope said. “I’ve never seen it, and that is a credit to our guys. Gives you a sense of our players.”
With the souped-up Chicago action and a transformed defense, this ride is far from finished, unless Sweet 16 foe Tennessee has something to say about it Thursday.
Oh, and by the way — John Calipari’s Razorbacks are also just three wins away from a San Antonio reunion.
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