As usual, quick takeaways from Cats Illustrated writers following Kentucky's latest game.

Here's what Travis Graf, Jeff Drummond, and Justin Rowland are thinking after UK's victory against Lamar.

Travis Graf: Kentucky shot the ball much better tonight and it opened up so much for their offense. The key for this team now is consistency. They gave up a couple of big runs to Lamar and also stalled out on offense due to poor ball movement and bad shot selection. I still think the ‘Cats took a step in the right direction tonight, judging by their assist numbers on offense and the number of blocks on defense. Kentucky has a solid core of players that you know what to expect from each night (Hagans, Maxey, Quickley and Richards), but they’ll need more out of their supporting cast moving forward.

Jeff Drummond: I think we all saw what the 3 ball can do for this Kentucky team if the Cats shoot it like they’re capable of shooting it. It’s a bit of a simplistic concept — yeah, of course getting three points on a trip down the court is good — but it’s not just what it does for those possessions when they sink one. The other possessions begin to look smoother thanks to the spacing and the lanes to the basket it creates for both drives and passes. I really liked Nick Richards’ active, stat-stuffing night, especially the seven rejections. Overall, this wasn’t a dominant performance, but it was a good one, and a step forward for UK.

Justin Rowland: There were several encouraging signs tonight. Seeing Kentucky knock down a bunch of three-pointers is something that will warm the hearts of Wildcat fans. More impressive, and more important, was the effort level was high pretty much throughout this game. Even more impressive than that is that you can include this performance alongside what Kentucky did in the second half on Friday, when they were 15 points better than Mount St. Mary's. They built on a strong half with a much better game than we had seen for a couple of weeks. Finally, the biggest positive for me was after Lamar answered Kentucky's 10-0 start to the game, nobody slouched and started to lapse back into a negative mindset. Kentucky promptly answered with a 22-2 run to end the first half, which was a mature and needed response.

Tyrese Maxey needed a game like this, Nick Richards is at the point where we can say he is definitely a really improved player, and Ashton Hagans' off game against Evansville now appears to be the outlier.