Kentucky is more than the sum of its parts

And other first-week observations

Photo credit: Imagn Images

It was very obvious from the start of Tuesday night’s second Champions Classic game that one team was more glaringly talented than the other. Duke is ridiculous. You could see it right away. Cooper Flagg — late game-yielding turnovers aside — spent about 39 minutes being the best 17-year-old to ever grace a college basketball floor. Khaman Maluach, a five-star prospect, was somehow better than advertised, more physical and robust. Kon Knueppel looked at home starting and playing big minutes for a title contender. Every Duke lineup configuration was tall, athletic, flexible, and fluid. At halftime, Jay Williams said this was the best Duke roster since the team he played on in 2001, which was well, highly aggressive, and almost as if he feels the need to make constant sweeping pronouncements but you could sort of understand the impulse: Duke’s personnel is unmatched.

None of which mattered in the end. You know why? Because Kentucky, despite being the obviously less talented team for the first time in many Kentucky fans’ memories, was the better team at the end of 40 minutes.

Here is a fundamental truth about college basketball, which plays out every March: You don’t have to be the most talented team to win. You just have to be the better team on the night — the more cohesive team, the team that most maximizes its strengths and minimizes its weaknesses, the team with an identity, the team that collectively actualizes its understanding of self. This stuff seems soft-factor and nebulous and unquantifiable until you watch it happen year after year, night after night, until you realize that coaches spend their entire lives trying to conjure this magic, until you realize the magic is real.

That was Kentucky Tuesday night. That is the promise of the Mark Pope era.

This Champions Classic was the first time we can remember a Kentucky team being obviously less talented than its Champions Classic opponent. Surely it has happened before — some of John Calipari’s late-tenure rosters were questionably apportioned — but Tuesday night the gap was more evident than ever. Duke would run Jon Scheyer’s conventional, solid, matchup-based offense, seeking to exploit mismatches in an understandable but slightly predictable old-NBA way, and you know what? Fair enough. It would do so with the likely No. 1 overall pick, who scored 26 points and grabbed 12 rebounds, alongside the rest of a theoretically dominant team. Duke usually got pretty good shots.