Cats ride big first half to beat Rebels 84-70

OXFORD, Miss. -- John Calipari literally wrote the book on bouncing back, and the Kentucky coach has seen his teams do it plenty over the years.

And so he took the 18th-ranked Wildcats into Tad Smith Coliseum on Tuesday to face Ole Miss hoping but not knowing what he'd see on the heels of last Saturday's loss to Florida.

"So you lose a game, you come back and you beat somebody's brains in," Calipari said of his bounce-back ideal. "And I wanted to know how we would do today. And they responded."

The response was an 84-70 rout of the Rebels that was only that competitive thanks to a late second-half surge that Ole Miss coach Andy Kennedy attributed to "Kentucky boredom, maybe."

Though the Rebels trimmed a 22-point lead to six with less than two minutes to play, the Wildcats (20-6, 10-3 Southeastern Conference) made their last 19 free throws to hold off the charge.

"It says a lot about us," said guard Aaron Harrison, who finished with 17 points on 6-of-13 shooting in a bounce-back game of his own after a 1-for-7 night against Florida.

It said different things in different halves.

The first half was an offensive clinic for Kentucky, which despite turning the ball over on 29.4 percent of its possessions scored 1.235 points per possession. The Cats shot 58.6 percent in the first half, including 6 of 13 from three-point range, and outscored the Rebels 42-25.

"I mean, it was fun," Harrison said. "That's probably how every team wants to play every game. It's not going to happen. You always have bad games or just don't have the energy there some games and stuff like that. So that's what we're working on, just having energy. I think that whole big run just came from energy and enthusiasm."

That Kentucky had such energy and enthusiasm was telling.

Coming off perhaps its most difficult loss of the season -- it hung tough with Florida for 30 minutes before folding down the stretch -- UK played in the first 20 minutes with a precision that's been rare this season.

"We had two days where all we talked about, Coach said it, was like chemistry, energy," said forward Julius Randle, who led UK with 25 points and 13 rebounds. "We saw in the film, the last 10 minutes of the (Florida) game -- we played really well the first 30 minutes versus Florida and the last 10 minutes our chemistry and our energy dropped."

They had it in droves at the start on Tuesday.

"They were certainly coming in with a back-to-the-wall mentality after losing at home on Saturday," Kennedy said. "It's a tribute to Cal and that young team to be able to bounce back as quickly from a disappointing loss and play as well as they did early."

Much of that, Kennedy said, was attributable to Kentucky making shots, which sparked the Wildcats and deflated the Rebels.

In the second half, those shots weren't as easy to come by.

UK shot 42.1 percent after halftime, and that helped Ole Miss (16-10, 7-6) fight back into the game. The Rebels made six three-pointers -- four of them by senior Marshall Henderson, who scored 18 points -- and scored 15 points off Kentucky turnovers in the final 20 minutes.

The Cats' lead peaked at 22 points with 9:10 to play in the game. When Anthony Perez banked in a three-pointer with 1:49 remaining, it was down to six.

"I said at halftime, 'They're gonna make a run. You do know that, right? Now let's see how we respond to it, and let's make our own run,'" Calipari said.

The Cats did that, and Randle led the way. He scored 15 points in the second half and he made 10 of the 19 straight free throws the Cats sank to close the game. His basket to stretch the lead to 78-70 with 1:15 to play was UK's only field goal in the game's final nine minutes.

When it was over, the Rebels' run meant less than the Kentucky's big win, its most lopsided in a conference road game this season.

"I mean, this is one of those games -- we know that we can do this," Randle said. "We can do this every game. It's just our focus, our attention to being more into our team than into ourselves."