Perhaps it was fitting that Kentucky was playing its final exhibition game at the same time as the World Series on Tuesday night.

Mark Pope welcomed the opportunity for his Wildcats to see a few "change-ups" tossed their way prior to the start of the regular season.

Kentucky's new head coach got it as defending Division II national champion Minnesota State Mankato hung with the Wildcats for most of the first half, and a minor injury to starting center Amari Williams forced UK to make some rotation adjustments that could spark a few new ideas for the season.

"We had all kinds of in-and-out weirdness the first 14 minutes," Pope said.

The final six minutes of the half saw UK go on a 21-3 run to essentially put the game away.

"We hope that's a defining feature of our team," he said. "Two things about it: one is, the first part is, our guys are super-resilient and we have a team that can go fix things. We're a veteran team. We see the game, we understand the game, we can go fix things.

"And then the second part is, we always know it's coming, man... It could be in the first five minutes of the game, it could be in the last seven minutes of the game, there's going to be a 2-3 minute run that's kind of the death knell where our guys get it done. I like those two features of this team."

Kentucky missed 11 of its first 13 attempts from the 3-point arc, then reeled off 11 of the last 24. The Cats made four straight and five out of six during the decisive run that gave them a 43-23 lead at the half.

"It was good for our guys to actually experience that," Pope said.

The new UK boss learned a valuable piece of his ever-evolving coaching philosophy from working under veteran NBA coach George Karl.

"Coach had an incredible ability to not be a scoreboard-watcher," he said. "... He was an energy-reader."

So far, the energy has been outstanding for UK's entirely rebuilt roster for 2024-35.

"It's been fun to watch pieces work together and it's been fun to kinda see little places, even in these two exhibitions, where we just need to grow right now that are super-important to us," Pope said. "Gives us some data points. You always love having numbers that you can coach your guys with, but there were no big surprises."

Two areas he'd like to see improvement from the Cats in Monday's season-opener against Wright State is rebounding on both ends of the court -- UK was just +14 combined in two exhibition games against DII opponents -- and running the floor better at times.

Pope noticed the team took some time to adjust to the presence of point guard Kerr Kriisa, who missed the first exhibition game with a strained hamstring muscle.

"Good for our team to just feel him," he said. "...What's interesting was like the challenge for our guys, can you keep up? Kerr's racing down the floor so fast, where is everyone? Catch up, boys. That's something we need, so it was good to see that and feel that. Our guys are really going to enjoy playing with him.

"We've got a bunch of areas that we are excited to grow."