Box score | Player video interviews | Cal’s Call | Notes | Quotes | UK Athletics photo gallery

Let’s get something out of the way: John Calipari’s Kentucky team defeated cross-town school Transylvania 93-57 Wednesday night before 21,024 fans at Rupp Arena. Following a sluggish start, UK won its first game of the year, easily averting a 100-year upset in the waiting to a Division III school with the help of Terrence Jones’ 22 points and 12 rebounds.

But despite nearly doubling up the Pioneers, Coach Cal maintained a work-in-progress mentality following his team’s first real dress rehearsal.

“We have a long way to go,” Calipari said. “I think everyone knows it.  … The good news is everybody in this building saw it; anybody that watched on TV saw it. They also see we’re not tough enough.”

Hmmm, sound familiar? Rewind one week ago to the Blue-White Scrimmage.

“Everybody’s excited because you saw a lot of high-flying dunking, blocking, tipping,” Calipari said after that scoring barrage last week. “That doesn’t win.”

Maybe Coach Cal wasn’t just blowing smoke. Maybe it wasn’t just coach’s speak. Maybe he’s got a point.

After all, 230 combined points in a scrimmage is a ton of points in whatever way you choose to look at it. If you choose to view it from a defensive standpoint, as Calipari did after the scrimmage, one begins to understand that Kentucky, in spite of its gargantuan size, towering length and scorching speed, is far from defensively sound in the early going.

Freshman forward Anthony Davis (his injury was just a cramp) finished with eight blocks, including a volleyball spike into a Transy cheerleader’s face in the second half, but Kentucky’s perimeter defense allowed the Pioneers to bury 12 3-pointers, most of them coming early.

“We were telling them, they’re going to shoot 3s to try to stay in this game,” Calipari said in exclusive postgame interview with CoachCal.com. “You’ve got to go out, make them put it on the floor and bring them to our shot blockers. We did block 11 shots, but we should have. It shouldn’t have been eight of them by one guy. More guys should have been blocking shots than they did.”

The Cats also failed to register a steal in the first half and totaled just one until midway through the second stanza (they finished with six).

Coach Cal said he would have to watch more tape to fully assess the defensive effort, but freshman point guard Marquis Teague noticed one area lacking.

“We just know that we’ve got to communicate more,” said Teague, who finished with 14 points and nine assists, good enough to earn first-game praise from his coach. “That was our biggest problem tonight on defense. We were making little mistakes because we weren’t talking and things like that. We just want to work on communication and just playing tougher. They were playing tougher than us honestly.”

It’d be easy to disagree with Teague if you look at Transy’s final statistics Wednesday night. The Pioneers finished with 53 total points, shot 31.1 percent from the floor and had 11 shots swatted from the air. UK also held Transy without a point for nearly nine minutes late in the second half.

But sometimes stats really don’t tell the whole story. This one, against a team that featured only one player over 6-foot-6 (6-8 Mike Satterwhite, who played one total minute), may have been one of them.

“Got a lot of work to do defensively, conditioning, toughness, execution, understanding you can’t settle,” Calipari said.

The toughness part, in particular, was what really irked Calipari in the opening minutes. Not even two minutes into the game, Transy took a 5-0 lead as UK clanked three shots from behind the 3-point line.

“They started that game, made shots, played with unbelievable emotion, played harder than us, got every loose ball, took charges, did everything they had to do to stay in the game,” Calipari said. “Here we are with a big height advantage (and) I think probably five of our first six shots were 3s. Am I missing something here?

“But that’s what happens when you have a lot of young guys or guys that aren’t playing with that fire that you’ve got to play with. They’ll settle.”

As a surprisingly loud Transy contingent roared, Calipari called a quick timeout at the 18:11 mark.

“He was like, ‘What are you all doing? Pick it up. You all are playing soft right now. Why are you settling for jump shots?’ We wanted to get it into the big men in the post and attack the basket,” Teague said.

Michael Kidd-Gilchrist stuffed the stat sheet Wednesday with 19 points, seven rebounds and five assists. (photo by Chet White, UK Athletics)

It took an injection of “viciousness,” specifically the intensity of a player Calipari lauded a day earlier to reverse UK’s fortunes.

Falling behind as much as 11-4 early on, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist entered the game and inserted a desperate sense of fire.

“He plays just like DeAndre (Liggins),” said sophomore point guard Doron Lamb, who finished with 19 points on 8-of-11 shooting.

Liggins in spirit he might be, but Kidd-Gilchrist seems to possess a much more polished offensive game than Liggins even at this stage in his career.

The freshman forward finished with 19 points, seven rebounds and five assists in 25 minutes of efficient play. He hit nine of his 12 shots.

“He was the difference in what happened,” Calipari said. “He did what I knew he would do.”

Calipari said Kidd-Gilchrist all but assured himself of a starting spot going forward, although Kidd-Gilchrist said it doesn’t matter to him.

“It felt great,” he said of his first game. “We got the win. That’s all that matters to me.”

Fifteen of Kidd-Gilchrist’s 19 points came in the decisive second half, including an emphatic tomahawk dunk that seemed to put an exclamation point on a 21-2, pull-away run.

“A relief,” Kidd-Gilchrist described the feeling of the slam, a dunk in which he took off well before the charge circle. “That’s just me. That’s what I do best.”

Early as it may be, Kidd-Gilchrist could be a model for Coach Cal as he continues to try to improve and prepare his team for the regular season.

“I wish it was easy – just put a group of guys together and they just play,” Calipari said. “That’s not how it works. Got a lot of work to do.”