Kentucky gets early signature win at Champions Classic against Duke

ATLANTA — We’re going to have plenty of time, like maybe a decade or two, to talk about Cooper Flagg. And in the aftermath of Tuesday’s Champions Classic, the presumptive No. 1 pick is going to get his first real taste of what the world of sports takes is all about.

That’s how it works when you live up to the hype for 39 minutes but mishandle a ball in a crowd and then dribble it off your foot with the game on the line. Better get used to it.

But Flagg is 17 years old and Duke is still Final Four caliber team. It’s way too soon to start nitpicking.

It is not, however, too early to render a judgment on the other big storyline from a remarkable night of college basketball.

Mark Pope? Yeah, he’s the real deal, too. Just a couple weeks into the college basketball season, he’s already made Kentucky basketball fun again.

It’s been awhile.

“This group is special,” Pope said after Kentucky’s 77-72 victory, giving him a signature win right out of the gates and at a time when there was — and probably still is — some uncertainty about whether he's up to this mammoth job.

Time will tell. But one thing you can already see: There’s a major vibe shift around Kentucky basketball.

Freed from the tension of John Calipari’s stubbornness, his deteriorating relationship with Kentucky’s administration and his antagonistic posture toward a fan base that cares like no other in sports, Big Blue Nation will not find this kind of basketball difficult to embrace.

It’s beautiful, it’s energetic, and most of all its drama-free.

Yeah, Kentucky needed a change. They got it. And it looks as if they’re really, really going to like it.

Nothing against Calipari, a Hall of Fame coach whose first 10 years there were phenomenal. But the whole operation got stale, it got contentious, and his last four seasons were a slow-motion train wreck that ended with some embarrassing NCAA tournament defeats.

Still, when Calipari left for Arkansas, there were no guarantees about how it would go for Big Blue Nation. After all the big names said no, the initial reaction to Pope was strongly negative.

Despite being part of Kentucky’s 1996 national title team, he was still a coach with no NCAA tournament victories in nine years at Utah Valley and BYU.

Kentucky fans, of course, quickly embraced Pope because there was really no other choice. He wasn’t just one of theirs, he reminded them what that actually meant. For 15 years, the program was about the Calipari brand. From the first moment he got the job, Pope was determined to flip that back around and make Kentucky the star of the show.

That’s a great way to start a honeymoon, but you also have to show it on the floor. And with a roster that Pope pulled together largely from the transfer portal, there was a scenario where Year 1 was basically a write-off.

“Nobody knew each other,” Pope said.

But you can already see that Pope is really good at three things that will serve him well as Kentucky’s coach.

The first is that he is incredibly dialed in to how players interact with each other and feed off each other. He talked, for instance, about the human nature for people to pull away from problems and the intentionality it takes to do the opposite. You saw that Tuesday when Kentucky got down 10 points in the first half and just kept hanging in the game until the experience and physicality of its older players took over in the final minutes

“I felt like it was really special for us,” said senior Andrew Carr, a forward who transferred from Wake Forest and scored 17 points with two huge and-1 finishes in the final minutes. “Not everything was going our way, and coach talks about turning into each other, the people that matter, and the closer we get it's harder to beat us.”

The second big trait of a Pope team is the offense. It just flows. For years, one of the big frustrations fans had with Calipari is that the ball didn’t move enough, there wasn’t enough spacing and he didn’t emphasize 3-point shooting until his final season. With Pope, that’s not an issue. The ball zips around, guys move off the ball and everyone has the green light to shoot when open. This was the ballgame: Kentucky made 10-of-25 threes to Duke’s 4-of-23.

And the third thing is that Kentucky just plays really, really hard, which it will need to do against most teams. The Wildcats have some good pieces, but they won’t have a huge talent advantage in most of their big games — and they certainly didn't against a Duke team with multiple future NBA draft picks. That's arguably the biggest reason why Kentucky’s effort just wore down Duke to the point where Flagg was too exhausted to execute down the stretch after scoring 26 points and grabbing 12 rebounds in 32 minutes.

“Guys went and sat in the locker room (at halftime) and it was constructive,” Pope said. "Guys do most of the fixing before I get in the locker room. It was just sheer resolve and determination. There was a lot of ebb and flow, and the game almost swung away from us, and the guys reeled it in.”

It’s still too early in the college basketball season to draw a whole lot of conclusions about where either Kentucky or Duke is going to end up. But for Pope, a man who arguably has the best but toughest job in college basketball, it was a validating night.

He said after the game that he'd have felt the same way about his team whether they won or lost, and that’s probably true. But beating Duke is no small thing, and the amount of belief and credibility Kentucky will get from this win will have a cascading effect on the fan base, on recruiting and on the confidence of a team that believes it might have something special.

All in all, Big Blue Nation couldn't have asked for anything more.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Kentucky tops Duke at Champions Classic, gets early signature win