Best ever within reach
Three more wins would cement spot as greatest team.
With every dominating win — we’re up to 370 — it becomes more and more apparent that Kentucky really isn’t competing against the remaining teams in the NCAA Tournament.
History is the opponent now.
Are these Wildcats better than the 1956 San Francisco Dons featuring Bill Russell and K.C. Jones? How about all those great UCLA teams of the 1960s and ’70s with the likes of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton? And is this edition of Big Blue even better than the last champion to go through a season unblemished, the 1976 Indiana Hoosiers?
Nothing against those giants of the game, but we’ll take Kentucky — with a caveat.
These Wildcats still must win three more games, starting with today’s Midwest Regional final against Notre Dame.
But if they complete their run to 40-0 perfection — and it would take a Villanova-beating-George town-upset to stop it — they deserve to be at the top of the list.
Quinn Buckner, one of the stars of that undefeated Indiana team, was asked what it would take to beat Kentucky
“You’ve got to shoot it exceptionally well, you can’t turn it over, and you’ve got to rebound against them,” he said. “And then you still have to play defense, too.”
Oh, and one other thing.
“They’re going to have to have a bad day,” West Virginia coach Bob Huggins moaned after the Wildcats blew out his team by 39 points in the round of 16.
Given their size, depth, commitment to defense, and willingness to share the spotlight, a bad day seems beyond comprehension.
With a bigger front line than most NBA teams and essentially two starting units to keep the pressure on opponents for the full 40 minutes, Kentucky will stand as the greatest NCAA champion ever if it can win out — with all due respect to those epic teams through the years.
The Wildcats have been on a roll since what constitutes their only “slump” — consecutive overtime wins over Ole Miss and Texas A&M in early January, at the start of SEC play.
After that blip, the next 22 wins came by an average of 19.1 points, with all but four games decided by double-digit margins. Kentucky has turned it up another notch in the postseason, romping through three SEC tournament games and three NCAA games by an average margin of 21.5 points, including Thursday’s 78-39 destruction of West Virginia. During that span, the Wildcats have limited opponents to 34 percent shooting and 23 percent from 3-point range.
Led by the other-worldly starting front line of 7footer Willie Cauley-Stein, 6-11 Karl-Anthony Towns and 6-10 Trey Lyles, this might be the deepest squad ever. Nine strong, all capable of starting for just about any team in the country.
Also, Kentucky is playing in a deeper era, with more good teams, than the NCAA’s seven perfect champions, even taking into account that the top players only hang around for a year or two before heading to the NBA. Making the Wildcats’ path even tougher, they must win six tournament games over three weeks to cut down the nets, a big reason there hasn’t been an undefeated team since the field expanded to 64 teams in 1985.
With No. 1 — in any era — there for the taking, no reason to think they’ll slip up now.