The SEC Tournament's Wednesday News and Views

It’s that time of the year, folks, when Cats fans from all over the southeast get together for a weekend of basketball, fanfare, camaraderie and Golden Flake potato chips. It’s our annual Big Blue getaway with thousands of our best friends, most of whom we’ve never met before and will never see again. It’s the only time of the year we’ll willingly watch Vanderbilt vs. Mississippi State, and the only time of the year we’ll drink Sunkist. It’s a little thing we call the SEC Tournament. And it starts on Wednesday.

This year Big Blue Nation will flood the mean and scattered streets of Atlanta for the tourney’s last stop in the city of Ludacris for at least another decade. The house that sparked UK’s unexpected Final Four run in 2011, welcomed a tornado in 2008, and saw back-to-back UK titles in ’98 and ’99 is passing the torch off to Nashville for nine of the next 11 years, plus two in Tampa. I hate goodbyes, and this is a big one.

If you’re one of the many making the trek to the ATL, we encourage you to join KSR at STATS not far from the dome for Thursday and Friday morning’s radio shows and Friday night’s postgame show. (Pregame show is TBD.) If you’re not one of the many making the trek to Atlanta, you should really consider it. It’s going to be a grand ol’ time and the Cats could really use your hollarin’. This weekend could potentially be the beginning of something great, and if it’s not and the basketball is a letdown, there will be plenty of blue clad shoulders to rest your head on. We’re in this together.

Sooooo… see you there?

That’s what I thought. Cats.

*****

Tweak, tweak, tweakity, tweak, tweak, tweak.

I’m all tweaked out for the day (probably for the week) but you can catch Matt’s opinion on the tweak in the post just south of this one. We share a similar belief that the tweak is more of a motivator for the players than an actual adjustment to the offensive scheme. To me, and I could be 100 percent wrong here, Cal is using all of this tweak talk to convince his team “everything has changed” so they’ll enter the postseason with the confidence they once had. I think he’s playing mind games, and if you saw James Young and Julius Randle’s comments Tuesday, it might be working. They both said they expect elevated play on Friday.

Speaking of Tuesday comments, Calipari explained why he made said tweak now, during his pre-SEC press conference:

“Because it was very clear when you saw it. You run a business and do something for real and all of the sudden you have this business and something’s not working right and you can’t put your finger on it. You do a couple things and you try this and OK, and then something happens and you look and say, that was it. And I think they all kind of got it and, you know, and like I said, I’m just disappointed in me that I didn’t do it earlier. You know, why didn’t I catch this and why wasn’t I thinking in those terms? I think a lot of things this year, there were so many things that we were having to do to get individual players right and then get them together and then get them to fight through things; there were a lot of things. Now it’s, you know, let’s go, let’s do this.”

The Cats will be physical on defense.

If “tweak” was the word of the day, and it was, “physical” wasn’t far behind. We must’ve heard it 50 times on Tuesday. Cal said his players will be more physical defensively and they are working on bodying up since the officials haven’t been calling games as tight as originally expected.

“What we did yesterday, first thing was defensively it was physical, put your arms up, let me see your hands and then foul with your body,” he explained. “Do it on every drive and every post-up. For two reasons, one, we can play against it because that’s how everybody is playing now and I’m not just talking our league, I’m watching around the country. The second thing is if we get in a game where we’ve gotta play that way then we gotta have — we gotta play that way. You know, we went for a season saying hands off, don’t touch the body and it was, you know — obviously as each month and week went on, it got more and more physical. So basically we’re back to where we were a year ago when everybody said you foul on every possession to win. So we just had to practice that way.”

Kentucky wasted a lot of time early in the year adjusting to how the game was to be called in 2013-14, only to see the referees call it the same way they have been. If the refs are going to let ’em play in March, the Cats might as well body up and play physical — make them blow the whistle.

Julius Randle is Calipari’s fifth SEC Freshman of the Year in five seasons.

Randle joins Nerlens Noel, Anthony Davis, Terrence Jones and DeMarcus Cousins in the UK basketball trophy cabinet as SEC Freshmen of the Year under Coach Cal. The power forward from Dallas was also named to the SEC’s All-Freshman team, an honor he shares with James Young, and First Team All-SEC. Young earned a spot on the conference’s second team.

UK watched Trinity’s Ray Spalding Tuesday night.

Coach Antigua was in Louisville to watch Trinity junior Ray Spalding help his Shamrocks to a regional championship and a trip to the Sweet Sixteen over top-ranked Ballard. Spalding, ranked No. 88 in the country and No. 1 in Kentucky according to 247Sports, was held to four points and nine rebounds in the win. The 6-foot-9 forward has an offer from Indiana and is catching heavy interest from the Cards.

The New York Daily News says Cal is a candidate for the Knicks job.

The rumor that keeps on giving.

Kentucky is now 40-1 to win the NCAA title.

Once the favorite to hoist the Wooden National Championship trophy in 2014, your University of Kentucky Wildcats now have 40-1 odds out in lovely Las Vegas. That’s quite a difference from the 7/2 odds on Kentucky to win the title in the preseason. A $100 bet will pay out $4,000 if you were to get it in now, as opposed to the $350 you would win if you made the same bet last fall.

A woman was drawing on children at a Lexington Salvation Army.

From the @LexKYScanner Twitter account:

Report of a female at the Salvation Army approaching other people’s children and drawing on their faces with lipstick. LexPD en route.

We’ll stay on top of this one.

I’ll leave you with this video, just because.

Go Cats.