He could have said that the
Harrison twins were 9-for-13 from the field the game's first 32 minutes.
He could have said that the Harrison twins have a knack for sinking
clutch shots in key moments. He could have said that Kentucky simply was
having trouble getting the ball inside to Karl-Anthony Towns.
There are all
sorts of plausible explanations John Calipari could have given for his
ill-fated reliance on Andrew and Aaron Harrison late in Kentucky's Final
Four loss to Wisconsin last April, but the one he chose stretched the
bounds of credibility.
"Now
you may say, ‘Why didn’t you have Tyler and Devin in at the end of the
Wisconsin game? You probably would have won,’ ’’ Calipari said during
his hour-long talk. “Because I was being loyal to those other two who
led us to a championship game a year ago and they deserve to be on that
court. That’s why I did it. I knew who was playing well and who was
struggling. You think I wasn’t sitting there watching?
“But I owed it to those two (the Harrison twins) to do it.’’
Putting
the ball in the hands of the Harrison twins turned out to be a hotly
debated decision because neither Andrew nor Aaron played well after
Kentucky took a 60-56 lead with less than seven minutes remaining in the
second half. The Harrisons missed seven of their final eight shots from
the floor, helping Wisconsin pull away for a 71-64 victory that ended
Kentucky's bid for the first undefeated season since Indiana did it in
1976.To his credit, Calipari went to great lengths the night of the Wisconsin loss to absolve the Harrison twins for their late-game mistakes, even going so far as to tell reporters that he alone deserved blame for the loss. What he said Sunday undermined that — so much so that Calipari felt the need to clarify his comments on Twitter within minutes of USA Today publishing its story.
Insisting
that he'd purposely jeopardize his team's chances of winning a national
championship out of loyalty to the Harrison twins isn't the only time
Calipari has resorted to revisionist history when looking back at his
team's record-setting 38-1 season.
In May, he claimed getting eight players drafted was a bigger goal than winning a national title. In August, he insisted some of his players looked "relieved"
in the locker room after the Wisconsin loss since they were finally
free of the burden of vying for 40-0. Later in his speech at the
coaching clinic in Los Angeles on Sunday, he also said that falling
short of winning the national title wouldn't diminish the legacy of last
year's Kentucky team.
“At the end of
the day,’’ Calipari said, “I just ask you this, ‘Who won the national
title three years ago? Two years ago? Six years ago?’’
There were no answers from the crowd of about 200 coaches.
“Who
won their first 38 games?’’ Calipari said. “Twenty years from now,
they’re going to say, what team did that 38 and 0 at the start of the
season? You’ll go, ‘Oh, that’s Kentucky.’ ”
To
some extent, Calipari is right — what Kentucky accomplished last season
was historic and remarkable. But just like we remember that Duke upset
undefeated UNLV in the 1991 Final Four and the New York Giants
toppled the unbeaten 2007 New England Patriots in the Super Bowl, we'll
also bring up the fact Wisconsin ended Kentucky's season last April two
wins shy of a championship.
Ultimately,
the solution here for Calipari might be to stop talking publicly about
the Wisconsin loss because he's clearly still sensitive about it. Or if
he's asked about the loss, perhaps he can just repeat his classy remarks
from the podium that night in Indianapolis.
"We
would have loved to have been 40-0," Calipari said back then. "Let's
see if we can take another stab at it. But 38, what these guys did in a
row, incredible stuff."
See, how hard was that?
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