LEXINGTON — Maybe there’s some magic in Kentucky basketball‘s denim jerseys. The 1995-96 UK team, the first one to wear the pattern, never lost in the look.
And after once staring at a double-digit deficit at the half, this season’s Wildcats, sporting denim jerseys for the first time, dug deep yet again to engineer another memorable comeback Saturday night — and ensure the program remained unbeaten in the jerseys.
For the second time in less than a month, Tennessee was on the wrong end of the rally, as Kentucky earned a 74-71 win at Rupp Arena.
After the latest stunning victory, UK coach Mark Pope, surrounded by his fellow members of that championship club of three decades prior, couldn’t heap enough praise upon his players.
“I talked to our guys before we went out in the locker room,” he said. “Because this is Kentucky, there’s so much noise surrounding everything these guys do. And honoring the denim and bringing back the denim was such a big deal, such a big story, that I talked to them right before and I said, ‘Guys, I know all this is going on, but this is not about 30 years ago. This is not about denim. This is not about anything except for the story that you guys are writing right now.’
“Because the story that these guys are writing right now is awesome. It’s their story.”
The Wildcats (17-7, 8-3 SEC) trailed by 14 points, 47-33, at intermission.
But the hosts outscored the Volunteers (16-7, 6-4) by 17 points (41-24) in the final 20 minutes, giving Pope’s group its eighth win in the last nine games. It also gave Kentucky a sweep of the home-and-home series against UT for the second time in as many years of the Pope era. That earlier win, Jan. 17 in Knoxville, Tennessee, unfolded in remarkably similar fashion.
UT led by as many as 17 points in the first half. UK departed with an 80-78 win.
“I can take this (loss),” Tennessee coach Rick Barnes said. “The one in Knoxville? Shoot. It took me two days to get over it, and I’ve been doing this a long time, and I can normally let them go pretty quickly, but that was the way — we just gift wrapped that one. But they did what they had to do. They did exactly what they had to do to win the game. This is exactly how we thought the game would be. … You knew it was going to settle into coming down to a last-minute play.”
The players who so often have been the chief catalysts in Kentucky’s come-from-behind triumphs took the lead.
Senior guard Otega Oweh scored nine of his team-high 21 points after halftime. That included an acrobatic up-and-under layup that briefly handed the hosts a 61-60 advantage as the clock ticked toward six minutes remaining. Impressive as it was, Oweh said he’d only place it among the top four highlights of his Kentucky career.
“That was crazy. I really thought they were going to call a foul,” Oweh said. “I could have (shot it) on the same side, but I just tried to really sell it — you know, put that spin on it.
“That’s that ‘Mikan drill‘ we do every day.”
Oweh also was in the middle of the game’s biggest shot. Only this time, he was the distributor, not the shotmaker. With the Wildcats trailing 69-68 and under a minute to go, Oweh drove into the lane. The Vols’ defense collapsed on him. Oweh responded by whipping the ball to an open Collin Chandler.
The sophomore guard did the rest.
Defined by his clutch play all season, Chandler buried the go-ahead 3 to put UK on top 71-69.
Chandler laughed off a query about whether he feared failure when he rose to fire away.
“Scared? … For sure not, for sure not,” he said. “It’s like I’ve been saying: It’s what you dream of.”
Oweh’s torrid scoring stretch is no surprise: Saturday is the 24th time in 24 games this season he’s logged a double-figure point total. Chandler’s knack for making winning plays — recall that aside from his clutch shots, he also was responsible for the pass from the opposite baseline that set up Malachi Moreno’s buzzer beater at LSU — also has become routine.
Far more overlooked is Mouhamed Dioubate. But he provided what Pope dubbed “the play that sealed the game” Saturday: The junior forward tracked down the offensive rebound after Chandler missed the front end of a 1-and-1 with three seconds left and Kentucky ahead only one point (72-71).
“The plays he’s making, they’re not the stuff that you see on ‘SportsCenter Top 10,’” Pope said. “But they’re the plays that win. … And you just can’t overstate the value of that. Sometimes, it’s hard to love that as a player when that’s who you are — which is unfortunate, because everybody else in the league would kill to have that guy that’s just going to go make that play.”
This story will be updated.
Reach Kentucky men’s basketball and football reporter Ryan Black at rblack@gannett.com and follow him on X at @RyanABlack.
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Kentucky basketball beats Tennessee, caps SEC rivalry sweep with rally