Undefeated Kentucky Set to Make Its Mark on History with Unparalleled Defense

Jay Bilas gushed about watching Willie Cauley-Stein play defense with nine minutes left Feb. 7 against Florida.

Bobbing and weaving, seven feet of floating and stinging, as the Kentucky Wildcats big man fluidly switched his guard along the three-point line. It was jaw-dropping stuff to the ESPN commentator. Most defenses would by now be at their most vulnerable.

“How many 7-footers are going to switch on a little guard and stay in front of him like that?” Bilas said a month ago as Cauley-Stein held his ground.

Then Karl-Anthony Towns did the same thing on the same possession, the other side of the floor.

That’s just how good 30-0 Kentucky is, and the Wildcats will try to wrap up the regular season undefeated at home in a rematch with Florida.

Good luck, Gators, right?

Good luck, America, from here on out, against a historically high level of domination that starts with defense.

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UK’s had a few close calls, including Tuesday night at Georgia when nothing was going right. The Bulldogs had a real chance to play spoiler in front of a country that grew increasingly interested to tune in as the game clock wound down.

It’s just not that simple. Nothing against Kentucky is. Not even when it shoots worse than 40 percent and its opponent (at home, no less) is 10 points higher. UK still scored 16 of the final 18 points at Georgia, for example.

Opponents are shooting just 34.9 percent—worst in the country. Take into account Ken Pomeroy’s UK rating of 39.2 this season for effective field-goal defense—which gives proper credit for made threes—and he noted to Bleacher Report on Thursday that no team since he started keeping tabs in 2002 has gone a whole season under 40 percent.

It’s blocked shots (second nationally). It’s tenacity on the glass. Basically, everything’s contested. And it’s what keeps the Wildcats unified and perfect.

UK finished with a season-low four steals at Florida a month ago, often looking timid at both ends of the floor in a wild environment that took head coach John Calipari some time to cajole his team to enjoy.

Just five Wildcats scored in a game the Gators doubled up on the scoreboard (18-9) in the first nine minutes.

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We all know how it turned out, though. Still a seven-point win. And the Wildcats will basically have home court the rest of the way behind relatively close NCAA tournament sites and a rabid fanbase. It will be hard for the United States of Underdog Lovers to gang up on them.

First, Kentucky heads to its final home game trying to reach the postseason like Wichita State last year with that zero intact.

Indiana State is the last team to reach an NCAA championship game undefeated (1979), and Bobby Knight’s 1976 title-winning Indiana squad (32-0) is the ultimate tippy-top of the mountain the Wildcats are climbing.

It doesn’t seem like 15-15 Florida can become a bar-trivia answer, despite doing pretty amazing things in the first meeting. It built a lead. It created seemingly opportunistic chances in half-court offense.

Even when Florida shot 49 percent in the first go-around, the Gators never looked smooth.

"It's tough shooting it over top of them," South Carolina's Sindarius Thornwell said after a loss to the Wildcats. "When you're jumping, all you see is their hands. ... When you drive into the lane, you can't see."

KenPom gives UK a 95 percent chance of winning Saturday, and perhaps as high of odds of Cauley-Stein throwing down one of these in what will presumably be his last game at Rupp Arena.

Billy Donovan’s team bravely built a 20-11 lead in the first meeting, shooting 60 percent early, but also found suffocating foul trouble.

The junior Cauley-Stein and freshman Towns are just too much, even when the Wildcats have lullaby moments like a string of two consecutive shot-clock violations the first time at Florida.

Various Kentucky media spent January writing about how historically dominant this defense was becoming.

Truth is, the pace has dropped off a little. Since late January, opponents are shooting a whole 2 percent better against the Wildcats. Now Virginia is allowing a full point less per 100 possessions, according to KenPom.

The 2012 UK team’s NCAA record for blocked shots isn’t threatened anymore, either. The Louisville Courier-Journal also pointed out the Wildcats as of Jan. 21 were blocking more than eight shots per game. Now that mark is barely less than seven. Oh, what a break for the rest of the field.

This is shaping up to be one of Kentucky's all-time great groups of talent, if the NBA draft is considered. Six Wildcats may get drafted; same as that 2012 team.

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Shot-blocker Anthony Davis went No. 1 in that 2012 draft and 6'9" power forward Terrence Jones was selected No. 18, the last time one school had two big men drafted so close together as Towns and Cauley-Stein will likely be this year, even if there have been periodic questions about the ongoing motors of this year's towering tandem, noted by UK followers and national draft pundits alike.

It is still quite special. Cauley-Stein is the first player in program history to amass 200 or more career blocks and 100 or more career steals, according to UK records.

The run to history is really just starting.

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But we’ll always remember the platoon, the unfair amount of athletic length (10 players at least 6'6") and the early season humiliation of a not-so-bad Kansas team, which set the baseline measure for how good these Wildcats could become.

We are more inclined to remember the great offensive teams of our time. Loyola Marymount, UNLV (though it built a lot of those massively fun scoring runs on its "amoeba defense") and even that Kentucky team from three seasons ago comes to mind as it was built largely on fast, scoring guards around Davis’ mature defense and raw offensive moves.

Tom Izzo’s Michigan State teams are known for defense. But we’d really have to go back 20 years, to 1994, when Arkansas unleashed full-court hell, to find a truly celebrated one.

Funny, there’s no look-at-us slogan to be found regarding UK.

Imposing and effective are just fine, and more than enough to stay undefeated a while—maybe forever.