Should we be expecting fights in Kentucky’s next game?
The Kentucky Wildcats have lacked toughness at times this season and most recently vs. the Texas Longhorns.
Playing winning basketball for 36 minutes, the Wildcats led by five, but they wilted in the final four minutes, getting beat to multiple 50/50 balls, settling for poor shots, and turning the ball over.
To help with toughness, Mark Pope added an interesting clip to the team’s film session in preparation for Vanderbilt, the USA vs. Canada hockey game from this past weekend. If you are not familiar with what happened, Team USA started three fights with Team Canada in the first nine seconds of the game.
“A lot of times we think of toughness as the first 30 seconds of the hockey game,” Pope said during his weekly call-in show. “That was in our film session this morning where guys just threw off the gloves, and everyone was in the penalty box in the first 90 seconds. Sometimes we think of toughness as that.”
However, Pope clarified that toughness isn’t all about physicality and fighting. There’s also a mental component to it.
“That’s a component of toughness, but for us, toughness is when the whole world is burning around you. You can still be focused on the task at hand. Toughness, to me, is an ability to be completely undistractable. There is nothing that can distract you from the moment, whether it’s your own fears or concerns or whether it’s a referee’s whistle or whether it’s something the opposing team does, or a mistake that you just made on the last play, or the crowd or the arena or injuries or anything else. To me, the greatest toughness is the ability to focus no matter what distractions are out there.”
Given all the adversity Kentucky has faced this season, that’s something they have had experience dealing with, yet they can continue to improve. They will get a chance to do so against Vanderbilt on Wednesday where they will be without three players due to injuries.
Focus on the task at hand and beat Vanderbilt, with hopefully no fighting.