The Cats Illustrated staff is embarking on its latest roundtable series and writers are first sounding off on how we should view Kentucky's 2018-19 season as a whole.
Was the season a success, a disappointment, or about what it should have been?
David Sisk: It was more of a success than a failure, but it wasn't a great season either. Going to Elite Eight is nothing to sneeze at. There are plenty of good programs who don't know what that feels like. But the expectation early on was for a National Championship. I felt like this was certainly a Final Four team. Whether or not injuries are to blame that might have negatively impacted the chemistry, the offense struggled when it mattered the most. The only player who had any shooting confidence in the last week of the season was P.J. Washington.
Warren Taylor: It's a rare season under John Calipari where the Cats don't finish with some kind of accolade or hardware. 30-7 and an Elite Eight is a fantastic season, even at Kentucky where standards are sky-high, but something about this year feels like a disappointment. I don't know if it was the poor play in big games or that the team never gelled the way one might have expected, but this team had more in them than we saw, at least in my opinion. The overall product was good and I won't call this year a disappointment, but there are a lot of what if's that fans and media alike will ponder all spring and summer.
Jeff Drummond: If you took the Wayback Machine to early December, after UK had been crushed by a talented Duke squad and beaten by a pedestrian Seton Hall club, I think most people would have been shocked if you told them the Cats were going to win 30 games. Before the season even started, I had this team losing five or six games in league play alone. In that sense, they may have overachieved. That's going to be a tough sell when people just saw them lose to an out-manned Auburn squad with a trip to the Final Four at stake, but when you look at some of the team's shortcomings, it's impressive that they were that close once again. Had they not missed an opportunity last season when the South bracket opened a golden path to the Final Four, it would be easier to deal with the disappointment of the Auburn loss. The sting of that happening two years in a row is going to linger with UK fans for a while.
Justin Rowland: This season is always going to be difficult for me to judge. With the benefit of hindsight, the preseason expectations were just wrong. But it's very hard to separate preseason expectations from how you feel about a team even at the end of the season. The Bahamas trip and the fact that this team was more experienced than some John Calipari teams had some even murmuring about a potential "Super Team" (and we should stop doing that, because the '14-15 team was totally unique). The Duke loss shaped our perceptions of this team for so long but they finally grew out of that and graduated to a new narrative. I said over the weekend that I thought this was a Final Four team preseason, in February and on the morning of the Auburn game. They did not get there, but I must confess that, stepping back, I can't say this should have been a Final Four team. The guard play was not elite. Based on what I thought this team would be, the season is somewhat of a disappointment. But based on what I watched for 37 games, the Elite Eight is probably right about where they deserved to finish. I think this Auburn team has basically been like the '97 Arizona team that made their magical tournament run just playing at an insanely high level. There is no shame losing to Auburn and I don't consider it a "bad" tournament loss. UK had a chance to pull away but when you can't shoot threes and your guards are less dynamic than those on the other team, it's hard to do that.
