Helps bring ol’ Kentucky home
basketball was the best player in this game, a game the Wildcats finally won by eight even though Pitino’s team tied them at 49 with 9:11 left.
Maybe all you really have to know about Davis of Kentucky is that he was Player of the Year in college basketball averaging eight shots a game, and taking the fifth-most shots on his team.
He took eight Saturday, made seven, chased loose balls over the press table, occasionally tried to cover everybody at once. And when it was 49-49, after Pitino’s guys had gone 17-4 on Kentucky to tie it, there was Davis to keep the ball alive at the Kentucky end and keep it from going out of bounds and get it to Michael Kidd-gilchrist, a fierce kid out of St. Patrick High in Elizabeth, N.J. Kidd-gilcrhist dunked and it was Kentucky by a basket.
Louisville turned it over. KiddGilchrist, who had foul trouble on Saturday, ended up scoring only nine points, came down the lane and spun, jammed, now Kentucky was up four. Louisville would get it back to two on two Peyton Siva free throws. But then the Cardinals would go almost five minutes without a basket. When Louisville did score again, it was 60-53 for the Wildcats and they were not going to lose to Pitino, the old Kentucky coach, the way they weren’t going to lose to the Cardinals in this big state basketball fight.
With 1:09 left, Davis took a lob pass and threw it down with one hand, such a loud dunk you wondered if they could hear it over all that jazz on Bourbon St. But it was not just scoring with Davis, because it never is, especially on a night when Pitino’s guys made it so difficult for Davis’ teammates to find him on offense. It was not just the blocked shots. It was that presence on defense, most notably one amazing stretch in the second half when Davis altered four straight Louisville shots.
“Nothing bothers him,” Michigan State coach Tom Izzo said. “You think you can push him around because he’s so skinny, but you can’t.
“And somehow he plays at this level without ever changing expression.”
Davis has been compared to John Calipari’s first great college player, Marcus Camby, back at Umass, back when Calipari coached there. No. As wonderful and natural a shot blocker as Camby was, and there were times when you had to compare his shot blocking to Russell’s, Camby is not half the player that Davis is for Kentucky. Anthony Davis: Still only half the player he will be someday in the pros, when he will become one of the best players you have ever seen.
There was a point in the second half Saturday when Kidd-gilchrist and Terrence Jones, big players for Calipari, had combined for a total of two points. Two. Still didn’t matter in the end. Davis would not let his team lose when it was all on the line in New Orleans, when the best team in the sport got pushed the way it did in the second half, when it was tied by the underdog Louisville Cardinals with nine minutes and change left.
In the morning, 8:30 on Canal St., Kentucky’s Wildcats on their way to an early-morning shootaround, there was Davis inside the kind of amazing tour bus you would expect from Kentucky basketball. Calipari is there, too, sitting at a table in the middle of the bus with his friend Dr. Bob Rotella, the sports psychologist, but even Calipari couldn’t beat Davis to the bus Saturday because nobody could here on Canal St.
“First on the bus,” Calipari said, pointing to Davis. “You want to start understanding this young man? Start there.”
Davis just smiled and said, “I guess I’m kind of ready for this game.”
First on the bus and last with the ball Saturday, after one more missed Louisville shot in the last seconds, one more time, even after Louisville had an amazing 19 offensive rebounds, that Davis was above everybody and coming down with his own last rebound of the game and the horn was sounding.
“One game closer to our D dream,” Davis said. avis brought his team here. Now he takes it to the last Monday night of college basketball. There have been other freshmen who have made it that far. None greater than the long, skinny kid out of Chicago, talking about his dream, playing like one in New Orleans.
NEW ORLEANS — Always when Kentucky needed him, on this night when Kentucky needed to beat Louisville in the semifinals of college basketball, always when Kentucky’s Wildcats needed him to carry them to the last Monday night of his sport, Anthony Davis was there. He was there and everywhere with his talent and grace and calmness and character, influencing this game in a way that statistics can’t properly explain, because sometimes statistics can’t explain his kind of greatness.
He is a skinny 6-10 kid with the wing span of a man a half-foot taller than that, and changes games and seasons the way he changes shots when anybody tries to get a shot over him, at the Superdome in New Orleans or anywhere else.
When it was over Saturday, when Davis had scored 18 points and gotten 14 rebounds and blocked five shots and altered so many others you got dizzy trying to keep track, Louisville’s Rick Pitino talked about the impact that Bill Russell once had for the greatest Celtic teams, because of Russell’s defense and shot- blocking and immense presence.
“You see why the Celtics won 11 championships,” Pitino said. “And when you see this young man at the collegiate level, you see why (the Kentucky Wildcats) are so good.”
Davis, a freshman out of Chicago and on his way to the pros, is half of what he will be in the pros when he gets stronger, which he will. But the best player in college