We should find out Saturday if Sunday’s close-call will be a wake-up call for the University of Louisville men’s basketball team.
The Cardinals (9-0) play Western Kentucky (5-4) at E.A. Diddle Arena in Bowling Green at noon Saturday in its first true road game of the season. UofL, which is No. 4 in both national polls, is coming off a 68-57 win over UNC Wilmington that left its coach and players, to put it bluntly, pissed off.
Louisville coach Rick Pitino was brief, very brief, in his post-game press conference.
“(UNCW) really deserved a better fate than that because they really outplayed us,” Pitino said. “Sometimes you have games like this. It’ll teach a valuable lesson to the people in that locker room (that) if you don’t play your style every single game, regardless of who it is...I mean this was great because we would have lost to Western (Kentucky). No question about it, we would have lost to Western.”
Montrezl Harrell, meanwhile, had more to say. Much more. The junior forward ripped his teammates for lackadaisical play against the Seawolves.
“I came in here and I told the guys it’s time to look at ourselves in the mirror and blame the person that’s in the mirror and stop looking to blame everybody else around you, that’s including myself,” said Harrell, who had 19 points and a career-high 17 points against UNCW. “When I come in the locker room I’m not just coming in here to yell at my teammates, trying to pick out and point at who’s doing bad. I put myself in it, along with these guys, so when me coming in the locker room and yelling, I’m hoping they take it better from me than what’s coming from the head coach.
“Honestly I hope this game right here opens our eyes, I really hope it does because if we keep coming out playing flat, keep coming out playing the way we’re playing in the first half against teams, we’re going to get end up getting beat by a team we shouldn’t get beat by. We’re going to get surprised, and that’s not what we want. I really hope and feel that my teammates take what I’m saying into consideration.”
We should find out Saturday, when Louisville takes on improving WKU.
The Hilltoppers started the season with a 77-70 win over Austin Peay, but dropped their next three games - to Richard Pitino and Minnesota as well as surprising defeats to Belmont and Stony Brook. However Western has since won four of its last five games. Its lone loss in that span was a 93-81 setback to Murray State on Dec. 6. The Hilltoppers bounced back from that with a 81-74 win at Mississippi of the Southeastern Conference, then followed that up with a 75-60 win over Chicago State on Wednesday night. In latter game senior guard T.J. Price tallied 29 points, hitting 6 of 9 shots from 3-point range. Price leads WKU in scoring (17.1 per game) and assists (3.7 per game) and is second in rebounds (5.9 per game). Meanwhile sophomore guard Chris Harrison-Docks, a former student at Trinity HIgh School, is second in scoring (12 ppg) and senior forward George Fant is third on the team in scoring (11.2 ppg) and leadins in rebounds (7.1 per game).
“More than anything we had some work to do to get ready for the road game,” Pitino said. “What we like to do right before conference play is go into a hostile environment, last year it was Kentucky and now it’s Western Kentucky, to get ready for conference play. It is going to be a very difficult game, they have a senior team and they are playing great basketball right now.
“The young man (T.J.) Price, their small forward, is playing outstanding. They shoot the ball real well and they have (George) Fant inside, another senior with great size. So we have our work cut out for us getting ready for this first road game.”
Photo courtesy University of Louisville Men’s Basketball Facebook Page
