UT Suffers Biggest Beat Down Of Pearl Era

Tennessee suffers biggest beat down of Bruce Pearl era

Ron Higgins, Commercial Appeal

Posted March 14, 2010 at 10:29 a.m.

NASHVILLE — When push came to shove for Kentucky on Saturday against Tennessee in the SEC basketball tournament semifinals, the Wildcats did a lot of both.

After splitting a pair of games with the Vols in the regular season, the Big Blue authored a 29-point beatdown, a 74-45 demolition before a Kentucky-dominated Bridgestone Arena crowd of 20,207.

The Wildcats (31-2), who advanced to today's finals against defending SEC tourney champion Mississippi State, a 62-52 winner over Vanderbilt in Saturday's second semifinal, gave fourth-year Tennessee coach Bruce Pearl his worst-ever loss.

With the officiating crew allowing contact akin to mixed martial arts, Kentucky was able to manhandle the Vols (25- at both ends of the floor. Tennessee's defense had no answer for center DeMarcus Cousins (19 points despite missing 10 free throws, 15 rebounds), slick point guard John Wall (14 points, nine assists, six rebounds) and smooth-shooting Eric Bledsoe (17 points), who hit five of the Wildcats' eight 3-pointers.

"We didn't match their physicality, and we let it go at the end," Tennessee guard and former White Station standout J.P. Prince said. "Defensively, we didn't rotate, left our bigs (post players) in too many one-on-ones and let them get too many cheap fouls."

And that happened even with the Vols playing a 2-3 zone defense the entire game. It was a given that Tennessee wasn't going to play Kentucky man-to-man, since UK made just 2-of-22 3-pointers against the Vols' zone when it lost at Tennessee, 74-65, on Feb. 27.

But this time, Kentucky hit 8-of-22 (36.4 percent) 3s, and shot 52.4 from the field (25-of-48). When the Vols did try to extend the zone, Wall sliced through the gaps, either flipping in acrobatic drives or dealing to Cousins for power buckets.

It was also impossible to keep Cousins off the boards. Kentucky outrebounded the Vols, 44-29, and Cousins had six offensive rebounds. UK had almost as many offensive boards (14) as Tennessee had defensive rebounds (19).

"We knew this would be a tough, physical game," Wall said. "Coach told us, 'We come out they're going to be physical. Don't let them punk you, and don't let them play hard on you.' We played hard and didn't get punked."

The fact that Tennessee had but one player scoring in double figures — guard Scotty Hopson had 11 points — was an indication of how much the Vols struggled to score. They shot a season low 30.9 percent (17-of-55), consistently failing to finish on drives to the basket over the Wildcats' wall of large, athletic clawing defenders.

"Defense and rebounding wins championships, and they are the best defensive and rebounding team in our league," said Pearl, whose team will await its NCAA Tournament at-large bid today. "It required a tremendous amount of energy for us to get open and get good looks. When we did battle back a couple of times, they made shots and put us away."

Tennessee trailed 32-19 at the half after being outscored 9-0 in the final 6:02 of the first half. The closest the Vols got in the second half was cutting UK's lead to six at 45-39 with 9:29 left.

But Kentucky responded with five straight points — a Patrick Patterson dunk and a Bledsoe 3 — both off Wall assists.

All that was left from there was the officials trying to make sure that no fights broke out in a game that featured four technicals and one ejection (Vols' guard Melvin Goins for an intentional low-blow against Cousins).

Kentucky coach John Calipari was happy that his team opened and closed the game with killer instinct, something that has been a problem this season for his young, enormously talented squad.

"We were down 18-4 when we played Kentucky in Knoxville, and we didn't recover from it," Calipari said. "Today, we said, 'Let's come out of the gate and keep it on.' When we make threes like we did today, there's going to be a gap."

Hopson-Pearl any vol fan TAKE THAT and ALL 29 OTHERS