New Look, Same Swagger for Kentucky in Impressive Champions Classic Win vs. Duke

Are we absolutely certain Kentucky's seven leading scorers from last season declared for the NBA draft?

Despite playing just its third game with a new cast of characters, the 74-63 final score doesn't even begin to represent how thoroughly No. 2 Kentucky dismantled No. 5 Duke in the Champions Classic on Tuesday night.

For prolonged stretches, it felt like we were watching a replay of Kentucky's 32-point thrashing of Kansas in the 2014 Champions Classic. There weren't quite as many blocked shots in this year's edition, but the forced turnovers, alley-oop dunks and fast-break points were vividly reminiscent of the team that would eventually win 38 consecutive games.

Nam Y. Huh/Associated Press

If anything, Kentucky looked even better on Tuesday than it did for the majority of last season because of how phenomenal its guard play was against the Blue Devils.

There's a old cliche in football: If you have two quarterbacks, you actually have none.

In basketball, however, it turns out that having three great point guards in the starting lineup can be the recipe for a team that is extremely fun to watch. Tyler Ulis, Jamal Murray and Isaiah Briscoe ran circles around Duke on Tuesday night, combining for 46 points, 12 assists and eight steals against just four turnovers.

Even more importantly, they made four-fifths of Duke's backcourt look completely helpless.

Grayson Allen entered the night averaging 27.0 points per game, but he ended up being a microcosm of everything that went wrong for Mike Krzyzewski's club. He and super frosh Brandon Ingram combined for just 10 points on 17 field-goal attempts to go along with eight fouls and eight turnovers. Point guard Derryck Thornton had more turnovers than assists, and reserve three-point assassin Luke Kennard failed to convert on any of his five field-goal attempts.

If you were just watching the game and not paying much attention to the scoreboard, it felt like Kentucky won by a landslide. It's only because of double-doubles from Amile Jefferson and Marshall Plumlee (no, seriously) that this didn't devolve into one of the most lopsided losses of Krzyzewski's illustrious career.

Plain and simple: The Wildcats looked really good. And they aren't nearly as inexperienced as one might expect from a team that lost all seven of its leading scorers.

They still have Alex Poythress, whose importance to the roster as an athletic freak of nature John Calipari has been professing ad nauseam for months. Marcus Lee was the forgotten member of last year's platoon system, but the junior forward is still there and flying around the court like a madman, resulting in a double-double on Tuesday. And even though he's only a sophomore, it'd be hard to overstate how much Ulis' one year of experience will bring to this roster.

Now comes the downright terrifying part for college basketball fans who aren't a part of Big Blue Nation.

As ESPN's Jeff Goodman reported after the game, Ulis was frank enough to admit that the double-digit win over the reigning national champions wasn't even Kentucky's best effort.

That isn't arrogance or hot air. The Wildcats seriously didn't play as well as we, they or their coach know they can.

After the game, Calipari offered a few more words than Ulis, telling reporters, "If we learn to fight every possession, play the guy before he catches the ball, be alert defensively and stay in the stance...and play off of one another, we're going to be really good."

The frontcourt struggled mightily early in the game as Plumlee greeted the first media timeout with nine points and four offensive rebounds. Skal Labissiere—the potential No. 1 overall pick in the 2016 NBA draft—played just 13 minutes before fouling out, tallying a very lackluster seven points and four rebounds. Derek Willis scored 25 points in the first two games before playing seven scoreless minutes against Duke.

Even with those deficiencies, though, the Wildcats put on a clinic and officially put the nation on notice. A lot of the names and faces may have changed, but the Wildcats are clearly one of the early favorites to win the national championship.

Per usual.

You might not yet be on a first-name basis with this year's freshmen at Kentucky, but everyone knows John.

He's the mastermind who has turned freshman-heavy rosters into national semifinalists in four of the past five seasons, and he certainly seems to be on his way to making it five out of six. His level of coaching excellence is so high that it's not even fun for Kentucky haters to bring up "the Robert Morris season" anymore, because it only serves as a reminder that the man has failed just once in the past six seasons.

Heck, even Breaking Bad and Mad Men weren't as consistently great as Calipari has been, and there's an outside chance that this could be his best season yet.

Kerry Miller covers college basketball for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter @kerrancejames.