Hyped or not, Great Wall still stands tall

Hyped or not, Great Wall still stands tall

The first thing I saw when I turned onto the Vanderbilt University campus on Saturday afternoon was somebody hawking T-shirts that read, “Kentucky's Great Wall.”

The hype machine around University of Kentucky freshman John Wall hasn't slowed a bit. It's been just a week since ESPN's “College GameDay” devoted a whole feature to the John Wall Dance.

But the murmurs around Wall have been growing, too. In December, everybody was ready to engrave the national Player of the Year trophy for him. But in February there's not even a consensus that he's the top NBA draft pick on his own team.

The tremendous play of teammate DeMarcus Cousins, the emergence of Ohio State's Evan Turner as a leader for Player of the Year honors and the faux-controversy of Wall's statements about “not listening” to coach John Calipari a couple of weeks ago all served to cool a little bit of the wall-to-wall Wall fest.

But if you needed a reminder of Wall's importance to the Wildcats, it only takes a minute to remember. In fact, the last minute of UK's 58-56 win at Vanderbilt is plenty.

With the game tied, Wall drove straight down the lane — something he's not doing nearly enough as the season goes on, it seems — lost it momentarily, got it back under the basket and went up and put the ball in to give UK a 56-54 lead with 40 seconds left.

“He looked at me,” Calipari said. “And I said, ‘Drive the ball, go!' And he just went in and did it.'”

And after a pair of missed free throws by Eric Bledsoe, when Vanderbilt came down with a chance to win, he didn't bite on a John Jenkins shot fake, then soared as Jenkins went up for a three. Wall not only blocked the shot but outfought Jenkins for the ball on the way down and was fouled.

Not many players in the country make that play in that situation.

With just over six minutes left and UK trailing by four and Vanderbilt at the free-throw line, Calipari did two things. He put Cousins back into the game with four fouls, then he called Wall all the way down the court, to the Wildcats' end-zone bench. He said he told Wall two things.
“First I pointed to (Cousins) and told him to ‘Tell your team to throw it in to that guy,'” Calipari said. “Then I told him, ‘You gotta look for opportunities to go make things happen, whether it's rushing up the court or whatever.'”

That's what it's about. Finding Wall opportunities. And as February becomes March, Cousins is going to continue to be great, and Patrick Patterson is going to continue to be solid, but Wall is going to be The Guy.

After Saturday's win, Calipari noted that inexperience is causing UK to allow opponents chances to win these close games. But confidence and defensive determination is allowing them to overcome this.

“Let me put it this way,” he said. “We just shot the ball 35percent on the road, 56percent from the free-throw line, 18percent from the three-point line, and I love it. This is exactly the kind of win I wanted to have — against a top-20 team, on the road.”

Wall made just 3of11 shots and finished with 13 points. Vanderbilt dogged him the entire game and did about as good a defensive job on him as anyone has all season.

But the end of the game is Wall's time of game. And the end of the season needs to be Wall's time of year.

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