Mark Pope says Kentucky had distracted effort and focus in loss at Louisville

The Kentucky Wildcats struggled in a lot of areas in Tuesday's loss to #12 Louisville. Kentucky especially struggled on the defensive end, where it seemed like the discipline and effort really lacked. Louisville was able to score in many ways, and even when Kentucky got its offense going in spurts, the Cardinals answered right back with a bucket of their own.

It's been talked about a lot at this point, but transition defense is what really hurt the Wildcats on Tuesday, as they started off the game not getting back fast enough and leaving Louisville's lethal shooters wide open. The Cardinals were able to get easy looks all game, which is why the trio of Mikel Brown, Ryan Conwell, and Isaac Mckneely combined for 27 of their 40 three-point attempts. Mark Pope spoke on Thursday and talked more in-depth on what exactly happened in the ugly loss. The head coach called it distracted effort and focus.

"It's just distracted. It's distracted effort, distracted focus. And so when you're under pressure and duress, sometimes you just fall into bad habits, default habits, distracted actions. And so, you know, we spend a lot of time the other night being really, really distracted and disappointing way. But it's human nature. It's what it is. It's what you fight as an athlete, is the ability to just kind of get back to focus on this moment. We didn't do it very well. ...I'm going to keep going back to this concept of distracted, because that's what I'm sitting on right now. That's kind of where I am trying to understand why we were out of character in so many ways."

Just how bad was Kentucky in transition on Tuesday? "We gave up 34 points in the first eight seconds of the shot clock. That's actually really hard to do, and it was so much in our response to the pressure was to to get out of character." Kentucky's communication was off as well, including Mark Pope's. "Our body language communication was poor in the game, and it's something that's incredibly fixable. ...My communication to the team wasn't as good as it needs to be, for sure. Our scout prep communication, there were some things where we didn't actually follow things all the way to the end."

The assist-turnover ratio really told the story, too, Kentucky's being 14-14 and Louisville's 20-6. There was a lot of uncharacteristic moments, and Kentucky will look to get that fixed and limit the distractions, because they got punched in the mouth quickly and Tuesday and dug themselves a hole that they couldn't get out of.