Mark Pope’s UK basketball team scores a major comeback. Coach talks about beating Gonzaga.

Mark Pope’s Kentucky Wildcats have done it again.

UK scored a memorable, and historic, victory on Saturday night with a 90-89 overtime triumph over Gonzaga in Seattle.

The No. 4-ranked Wildcats (8-1) trailed the No. 7-ranked Bulldogs (7-2) by 16 points at halftime and by 18 points early in the second half. But Kentucky battled back in the game, despite being without starting point guard Lamont Butler due to a right ankle injury.

Even after Butler’s replacement, fifth-year guard Kerr Kriisa, suffered what appeared to be cramping in the second half that knocked him out of the game, the Cats continued their comeback.

UK missed a pair of shots at the end of regulation that would have won the game, but Kentucky kept its foot on the pedal in overtime. The Wildcats took the lead after 30 seconds on a dunk by junior guard Otega Oweh, and never trailed during the extra period.

Fifth-year forward Andrew Carr led the Cats with a season-high 19 points, and fifth-year guard Jaxson Robinson scored 18 points while dishing out five assists without any turnovers. Robinson deputized as Kentucky’s point guard during crunch time of the win.

Pope now has his second signature win as the UK coach before Christmas of his first season. Per ESPN, Pope joins Adolph Rupp as the only two Kentucky men’s basketball coaches to win their first two games against opponents ranked in the top 10 of the AP poll.

UK also beat then-No. 6 Duke last month in Atlanta.

In defeating Gonzaga, UK snapped a streak of 175 straight games that Gonzaga had won when leading by 10 or more points at halftime.

Following Saturday’s stunning comeback win, Pope met with media members in Seattle. Here’s everything that Pope said.

Question about how Jaxson Robinson finished the game down the stretch for UK.

So we talk about this a lot, today in college basketball you don’t get to coach guys for multiple years very often. So I was really blessed to coach, I am insanely blessed to get to coach Jax for a third year.

Watching players grow is like the best thing ever. It’s just the best thing ever, it’s the best thing about basketball. And there was a game that I tease Jaxson about all the time. Last year we were playing at Oklahoma and we were in a really good part of the season, but we kind of just laid an egg that night.

Jax was having to play a lot of point guard for us at the time, and after one bad play, he was in transition defense — I guess in the first half — running right by me on the bench and he turned and yelled in transition defense, “I’m never playing point guard again!”

And my guy, a year later, is a five-assist, zero-turnover, played the point for the last eight minutes of the game under massive duress, and the full overtime. I’m telling you, he’s special man. What Jax has done the last three or four games, defensively, is breathtaking, and toughness-wise, is incredible.

(He) hits an insanely difficult shot in the overtime period to boot. He was really special man. The first thing he did was go straight to the training room, trying to get Lamont and Kerr healthy. We’ll see how that works out, but until that happens we’re really blessed to have Jaxson Robinson.

Question about Kentucky switching to a zone defense against Gonzaga.

Well, it’s easy to make that decision when you’re getting cooked. This is really true, sometimes you’re sitting there in the huddle and you’re like “Well, why not try it? Because right now what we’re doing is not working.”

We’re really blessed to have veteran guys to where we can change a lot. We tried some blitzing, we tried some morphing zone, it’s a little bit of a zone we run that morphs between man (defense) and a zone. It can be kind of confusing. You can’t do that with a young team or a new team, but we’ve got these veteran guys that are super high IQ, and so we can mess around with it.

And these guys did an unbelievable job messing around with the game in the second half, it really helped us.

Question about Kentucky scoring 90 points while only making seven 3-pointers.

We’ll get to that. We’ve got to fix that. That’s going to be a really important part of our agenda, but we have it in us. We’re learning. The process we’re in right now, is we’re going to grow, we’re going to keep getting better and better and better.

We had a couple really productive days in practice where we’re starting to understand how to be us, against the best defenses in the country. And I was incredibly proud of our guys in the second half, because we’re going to have a really nice film session about cutting teams up because we did. We cut.

We’ve been talking for the last two days about cutting, cutting, cutting and we had some guys make some unbelievable plays, some lane passes to each other that are really important, that all come from guys being willing to cut hard.

So, I was massively encouraged today by us learning how we can punish, just seeing some of the fruit of these guys’ work the last couple days about learning how you can punish teams and really push them. It was actually terrific, it was really good.

And you have a little bit of success like that, the guys are going to see it and they’re going to believe it a little bit more. It makes them a little more dangerous, and so that’s really encouraging.

Question about Lamont Butler and Kerr Kriisa’s injury statuses.

Lamont came to shootaround today and we kind of tried to just push (his right ankle injury) a little bit and it just wasn’t working.

Kerr, we’ll go get some imaging as soon as we get back and kind of see where he stands.

So we’ll see on those guys. I do think Lamont is making good progress. And hopefully Kerr, Kerr is tough as nails so it will take a lot to keep him out.

Question about why Kentucky has gotten off to slow starts against Clemson and Gonzaga.

Yeah, I think the guys have just been like “Man, we feel like BBN is a little bored, and so we just want to make it super, super exciting.”

A late night game? People who went to sleep at halftime are going to be so sad.

Question about how UK handled Gonzaga’s frontcourt.

They were terrific. They do what Gonzaga does. Fewy (Gonzaga head coach Mark Few) is probably the best in the business. I think just about every number in the game of basketball would bare out that he’s probably the best in the business and Graham (Ike) was unbelievable in the first half.

He was ridiculous, He had us on the top and just made every shot and they do it so fluidly and Ryan (Nembhard) does such an unbelievable job. He’s a 10-to-1 guy (assist to turnover ratio) and he was 10-to-1 again tonight. It’s insane.

They’re a really good team. This Gonzaga team is a really good team. We talked about it as a team that this would feel like a Final Four game and early in the season it certainly did take on that texture for us. They posed all kinds of challenges, but (Gonzaga’s) ball screens were really, really hard for us in the first half. It was super hard.

Question about Jaxson Robinson’s two assists in overtime.

Our guys, we’re OK making mistakes our way. And both of those plays (could be) mistakes that are our mistakes. As long as we’re making our mistakes, we’re OK. Jaxson was a little bit courageous down the stretch, but it worked. It was awesome.

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