The Cardinals’ three-point game disappeared against Mercyhurst, but their defense and rebounding never did. For Kelsey, that was a promising sign in an otherwise forgettable exhibition.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB+WAVE) — Pat Kelsey showed up to coach a basketball game Wednesday night and a tractor pull broke out.
Fortunately, he brought a tractor.
Louisville has had basketball teams over the years that showed up for tractor pulls driving sports cars. They looked terrific on the open road. Sleek. Fast. Lots of horsepower. But when the pavement ended and the mud started, they were liable to wind up with their wheels spinning and somebody calling a tow truck.
Wednesday night, Kelsey’s Cardinals showed up with something that could handle a little mud.
It wasn’t pretty. The three-point show the Cardinals put on at Kansas didn’t follow them home. They made two three-pointers all night. They attempted only 13 — one fewer than they made against the Jayhawks.
One reason was Mercyhurst, which switched everything on the perimeter, then switched again. Another was that Louisville turned the ball over 17 times, on about a quarter of its possessions.
“A lot of them were us just throwing the ball to the other team,” Kelsey said, sounding a bit weary. “Literally throwing the ball to the other team.”
Their offense occasionally looked like somebody had put a boot on the wheel. Still, they beat Mercyhurst by 32 points, 71-39.
Now, let’s establish something right away. Mercyhurst is not Kansas. Mercyhurst is not North Carolina. Mercyhurst is not going to be confused with the Boston Celtics, even if their nickname is the Lakers. They were missing a couple of their better players, Kelsey said, and what they brought to the KFC Yum! Center was mostly a system — “They got 4,000 sets, and they got counters to every counter,” Kelsey said — designed to slow the game down and grind. They didn’t have nearly enough talent to make Louisville pay for its mistakes.
This wasn’t a championship test. It was an exhibition game in October.
But it was an interesting little exercise in what happens when a basketball team doesn’t get to play the way it wants.
Last week at Kansas, Louisville was a fireworks display. Jackson Shelstad couldn’t miss. Obinna Ekezie Jr. looked like a 7-foot-2 shooting guard. Everything was going in.
Wednesday night, almost nothing was going in from outside. And nobody seemed particularly distressed about it.
If you’re looking for positives, that was one. No bad body language. No moping. And most importantly, no slacking on defense.
“We just took what the game gave us,” Flory Bidunga said.
What the game gave Louisville was a lot of chances to do things that don’t generally make the highlight shows. Defend. Rebound. Protect the basket. Move people out of the way. Get to the rim.
Louisville outscored Mercyhurst 56-14 in the paint. It outrebounded the Lakers 51-32. It blocked seven shots, four of them by Ekezie. It won the fast-break points 12-2, and its bench outscored Mercyhurst’s 33-4. All of that is considerably easier against an outmanned bunch like Mercyhurst. It still has to get done.
The Cardinals defended well enough to make Mercyhurst’s offense look like it was trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube with boxing gloves on. The Lakers shot 23.9 percent. They scored on roughly a quarter of their possessions. Kelsey’s staff wanted to hold them to 0.81 points per possession. By Kelsey’s count, they finished at 0.57, a number that delighted him considerably more than anything his offense accomplished.
He had reason to be pleased.
“As ticked off as I was with not finishing around the rim and turning the ball over at halftime, now look at the stats,” Kelsey said. “I’m like, we’re guarding the crap out of them.”
“When you’re blah on offense, sometimes that affects your defense,” he said. “And they didn’t let that happen.”
The Cardinals weren’t particularly good on offense. They were considerably better on defense. And they didn’t appear to regard one as an excuse for the other. That was part of Kelsey’s plan when he assembled this team.
Last season, Louisville took more than half its shots from three-point range. Kelsey hasn’t abandoned the three. Nobody who watched the Kansas game would suggest that. And he would like to have generated more three-point chances Wednesday night.
Still, the added equipment helps.
Bidunga can block shots, rebound and dunk on people. Seth Trimble can defend. Ekezie can protect the rim. There are more ways to make a living than standing around the perimeter waiting for the ball to go through the net.
Kelsey also brought in John Andrzejek to run the defense, a completely new system, down to the angles of players’ feet against ball screens.
“John’s absolutely obsessed and consumed,” Kelsey said. “He eats, sleeps and drinks it.”
Kelsey called defense and rebounding a “strategic bet” when the team came together in June. Wednesday night, the bet paid off a little. Not that he was happy with everything.
He called the offense a tractor pull more than once. He complained about the turnovers, the 9-of-17 free-throw shooting and the general lack of urgency in the first half.
At halftime, Louisville led 30-21. It was 0-for-6 from three. Kelsey wasn’t particularly interested in congratulating anybody.
“Stop being soft,” Trimble said of the halftime message. “Play with purpose.”
Much of that message was aimed at one player.
“I really challenged Flo at halftime,” Kelsey said. “I thought he came out and really set the tone for us.”
Bidunga dunked on Louisville’s first possession of the second half, then dunked again 40 seconds later. He scored eight points in the first three minutes as Louisville opened the half on a 12-3 run. He had 12 points on 6-of-8 shooting after halftime and finished with 19 points and nine rebounds, five of them offensive.
Bidunga admitted the Cardinals had been playing a little soft. They knew they were better than Mercyhurst, and for a while they played like a team waiting for the other guys to acknowledge it. He also knew who was watching him.
“I have freshmen behind me,” he said. “Me being soft is not good for them.”
When that changed, the game did.
The Cardinals started attacking the basket, moving the ball with more purpose and taking advantage of their considerable physical superiority. It wasn’t complicated basketball. Sometimes the best play is to give the ball to the big fellow and let him put it through the hoop.
Karter Knox understood that.
Mercyhurst was determined to run Louisville’s shooters off the three-point line. Fine, Knox said. If somebody is charging at you, why shoot over him when you can go around him?
“Why settle?” he said. “We’re stronger. We can, we’re more athletic than them. Let’s get to the rim.”
Trimble, who finished with 10 points, seven rebounds and six assists, offered another thought.
“Defense is fun, man,” he said.
Nobody was claiming Louisville had played a perfect game. But the two exhibitions had presented different challenges. One was Kansas in Allen Fieldhouse, with the crowd roaring and the adrenaline flowing. The other was Mercyhurst on a Wednesday night in front of a crowd that wasn’t going to be mistaken for the Final Four.
“Kansas, Mercyhurst, whatever,” Bidunga said. “It’s not about them. I feel like it’s about us more than anything. Right now we’re preparing for March.”
Anybody can get excited about Kansas. The trick is playing hard against Mercyhurst.
Whether this team can win a tractor pull against Duke or Virginia is a question Mercyhurst wasn’t equipped to ask. But Wednesday suggested that Kelsey has a team that doesn’t necessarily need a racetrack to get where it’s going.
Last week in Lawrence, Louisville looked like a sports car. Wednesday night, it looked like a tractor.
There’s room for both in the garage.