I’ll admit it, I have believed every Kentucky basketball team I’ve seen before, was as good as this one - of course, this one actually is. If you want to die with Kentucky basketball on top, start living a riskier lifestyle and quickly get your affairs in order. This team doesn’t just play above the rim, it does work up there. If you want to see a better basketball team, lie down and go to sleep, because you will only see one in your dreams.
The graphed relationship between Kentucky’s performance and my sleep after a game is best represented as an inverted-U, with performance on the X axis and my sleep on the Y. After the way they played last night, I thought I would never fall asleep.
Dakari Johnson looks like a retired NBA center. He is the only big man we have who plays below the rim, but ask anyone who goes against him in practice or in games how much fun he is to play against. I am guessing they would say: it’s aggravating, frustrating, tiring, grueling. The ball seems to calm down when it finds itself in his hands. He says he is working on his free-throw shooting. He’s an ole pro. He will figure it out.
Willie Cauley-Stein looks like an avatar drawn 1.5 times normal size, by an imaginative artist specializing in the human male form. Imagine shooting a basketball with him prowling between you and the goal.
Alex Poythress jumps like he is made of 40 pounds of styrofoam instead of 240 pounds of muscle. At least I did not have to try to sleep last night with my dreams haunted by him blocking my shot from behind, the way a couple of Kansas players did.
Tyler Ulis moves the way we all do when we imagine ourselves a big-time college basketball player. He hit a 12-foot tear-drop with such touch, it might have been written and directed by Steven Spielberg and performed by Meryl Streep.
After last year’s tournament, every time Aaron Harrison rises up to shoot from the arc with his head leaned back and the ball heading for the bottom of the net, it’s as if everything goes into slow motion and I see his twin to the left of him, mouthing: “Go, Go, Go” and I hear Jim Nance say: “This is the spot where he does it!”
Karl Towns has a prissy gracefulness that makes it hard to take your eyes off him. Like all great players, what he does is better analyzed later in the replay, than as it occurs, because it’s often too subtle to appreciate in real time.
Andrew Harrison heads for the goal like there’s a tofu burger on the rim and he’s a vegan who’s been visiting his meat-eating family for a week. But he’s unselfish enough that if he sees one of his voracious teammates in a better position to eat, he will dish it to them.
Like a lot of Kentucky fans, I spend a lot of each game screaming my disbelief at what the TV is showing instead of what it should be showing.. An alley-oop that sailed out of bounds, should have been a spectacular dunk. A free-throw that should have been hit, bounced off the rim. This problem is especially acute for me with great freshmen players. Right now, I am still having trouble believing my TV when it shows Devon Booker and Trey Lyles missing shots. I may have to buy a new TV before long, if this keeps up.
In last year’s tourney game against Michigan when Marcus Lee’s head seemed to pop up beside the rim after almost every Kentucky miss and he would flush the ball into the net, I realized: I may never have been properly introduced to this young man. I still get the feeling I know precious little of what he might be able to do, but I am okay with the fact that he may show me something entirely new the last game he plays at Kentucky.
According to the data from the combine, Dominic Hawkins has a 44-inch vertical. How many 11th men in college basketball can jump nearly four-feet high, play solid defense and knock down the occasional three? I will give you a minute while you look that one up. None is it? That’s sort of what I thought.
Derek Willis’s sick reverse dunk at the end of the second exhibition game, made me wonder whether he ought not to have transferred to another school for more playing time. But for his sake, I am glad he didn’t. He has a free front-row seat for every game this team plays and that, is priceless.
