Pat Kelsey’s Cardinals overwhelmed Chattanooga in the first half, then struggled to score in the second. The season opener offered a glimpse of Louisville’s considerable potential — and some unfinished business.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB+WAVE) — For 20 minutes Monday night, Louisville played basketball like it had been waiting seven months to get started.
For the next 20, it played like it might need another week of practice.
Welcome to the 2026-27 season.
Pat Kelsey’s Cardinals opened with an 84-70 victory over Chattanooga at the KFC Yum! Center, a game that began as a demonstration of everything Louisville could do and ended with a fairly extensive list of things it still needs to work on.
There was plenty to like. There was plenty to clean up. And there was enough difference between the two halves to make you wonder whether the teams had switched uniforms at halftime.
Louisville scored 56 points in the first half. It managed 28 in the second. The Cardinals made eight three-pointers before halftime and one afterward. They shot 57.7 percent in the first 20 minutes and 29 percent in the last 20.
And they missed 11 free throws for the game, nine of them after halftime.
A team that had looked capable of scoring whenever it pleased suddenly couldn’t buy a basket, even when the basket was free.
The final score was never seriously in doubt. But the finish wasn’t nearly as pretty as the start.
And what a start.
Louisville was relentless defensively, attacking passing lanes, creating turnovers and turning Chattanooga mistakes into dunks and layups at the other end. The Cardinals moved the ball, ran the floor and displayed the kind of offensive versatility that makes this roster so intriguing.
The remarkable thing was that Chattanooga wasn’t playing badly.
The Mocs made seven first-half three-pointers, shot 47 percent from beyond the arc and scored 35 points. Against plenty of opponents, that would’ve been enough to stay within striking distance.
Against Louisville, it left them trailing by 21.
Kelsey said the first half was exactly what he wanted.
“The first half was really, really good on both ends,” he said.
The Cardinals led 56-35 at halftime and stretched the margin to 25 early in the second half.
Then somebody apparently misplaced the offense.
Louisville missed its first 12 three-point attempts of the second half. Flory Bidunga picked up his fourth foul with more than 10 minutes remaining. Seth Trimble encountered foul trouble of his own.
And the Cardinals began missing free throws with almost the same enthusiasm they’d displayed making baskets earlier.
Chattanooga kept playing. The Mocs cut what had been a 20-point deficit to 15 with 3:46 remaining, and while Louisville never faced any serious danger of losing, the game had long since ceased to resemble the first-half showcase.
The Cardinals shot just 1-for-16 from three-point range after halftime and made only 9 of 18 free throws.
But those numbers weren’t what bothered Kelsey most.
It was what happened after the shots stopped falling.
Kelsey said he turned to assistant Sean Dixon during the second-half drought and marveled at how many open looks Louisville was missing.
“We’re getting wide-open looks, and they’re just not going in,” he recalled telling Dixon.
That much he could live with.
What came after that was another matter.
“You do what you sure as heck hope your team never does,” Kelsey said. “They ... start feeling sorry for themselves a little bit and getting frustrated because the ball’s not going in.”
And suddenly, the problems spread.
Chattanooga had managed just one offensive rebound in the first half. The Mocs grabbed 10 in the second.
Louisville, which had spent the first 20 minutes attacking everything in sight, began standing around and watching.
The Cardinals hadn’t just stopped making shots. They’d stopped doing some of the things that don’t require making shots.
“Sometimes the basketball gods just aren’t on your side as far as the ball going in,” Kelsey said. “But you can always defend and rebound, and that’s what I’m most disappointed in.”
Louisville has enough offensive talent to survive an occasional cold spell. What it can’t afford is to let a cold spell become an excuse for everything else.
And Kelsey wasn’t interested in celebrating a comfortable opening-night victory while overlooking that.
“I’m not going to come in here and sugarcoat things,” he said. “And hey, a win’s a win. We won by 14, whatever it was. I just can’t do that.”
He wasn’t finished.
“I’m a little disappointed, and I’m a little ticked off, and I’m excited about getting back to work.”
The free throws deserve their own mention.
Louisville finished 15-for-26 at the line, a 57.7 percent performance that will need considerable improvement before the competition gets tougher.
The Cardinals have demonstrated in their first three appearances, including two exhibitions, that they have enough offensive weapons to win without depending entirely on three-point shooting.
But missing nearly half their free throws is a habit they can’t afford to develop. There will be games when those points matter a great deal more than they did Monday.
There were individual bright spots.
Bidunga led Louisville with 16 points, nine rebounds and three steals. Adrian Wooley scored 15 points and added four steals, displaying the aggressiveness Kelsey has been asking of him.
Wooley scored Louisville’s first basket after grabbing an offensive rebound, and he continued attacking the basket throughout the first half.
“Adrian is great when he’s leaning forward and he’s playing downhill and he’s playing on the attack,” Kelsey said. “And you saw that today.”
Jackson Shelstad and Trimble scored 13 points apiece, with Trimble adding five assists. Shelstad had seven rebounds.
Karter Knox finished with nine points and a team-high 11 rebounds. Kelsey praised Knox for continuing to attack the glass even as the team’s rebounding effort declined around him.
“He’s big, strong, physical, freight train attacking the rim, and he really, really crashes the glass,” Kelsey said.
Louisville also entered its opener with an unexpected personnel problem.
The school announced before tipoff that guard De’Shayne Montgomery will miss four to six weeks with a foot injury, taking another piece out of Kelsey’s rotation before the season had even begun.
That meant a larger role for freshman Isaac Ellis, who played 14 minutes in his college debut.
Ellis finished with one point and an assist, missing both of his three-point attempts and making one of four free throws. But Kelsey liked his willingness to mix it up.
“Isaac’s a tough, hard-nosed dude,” Kelsey said. “He saw loose balls out there, and he eats them, puts his teeth on them, plays hard.”
Kelsey added, “We’re going to need him this year.”
Montgomery’s absence comes with 7-foot-5 center Gabe Dynes already sidelined following shoulder surgery, leaving Kelsey with less depth than he anticipated having when the season began.
But Monday’s opener was hardly a discouraging performance.
For one half, Louisville looked capable of overwhelming a good opponent even when that opponent was making shots. The Cardinals’ defensive pressure, transition offense and ability to score in different ways were impressive.
The second half was considerably less so.
Kelsey wasn’t interested in pretending otherwise.
“We have a chance to be really good,” he said. “We have a chance to be special.”
That’s why the second half bothered him. Not because the Cardinals missed shots, but because they allowed the missed shots to dictate how they played. They began playing the score, Kelsey said. They let their frustration show.
“You can see it on guys’ faces,” he said. “Can’t be that way. Can’t be that way if you’re going to be an elite team.”
Louisville showed enough in the first half to raise expectations. It showed enough in the second to keep Kelsey busy.
But Kelsey isn’t questioning his team’s willingness to work. He said its leadership is outstanding, that his best players are his hardest workers, and that he barely needed to say anything in the locker room afterward.
“They know,” he said.