Citizen Runner wrote:
UK really shut down Cornell's offense, but it was strange that the announcers were going on and on about that while Cornell held UK to something like 8 points through the first 10 minutes of the second half. Cornell had nothing going offensively, but UK wasn't exactly scoring at will either.
Cornell's defense was even better than I thought in the 2nd half.
I found this link which shows the scoring throughout the game:
http://scores.espn.go.com/ncb/playbyplay?gameId=300840096Kentucky scored 8 points- EIGHT points the first 15 minutes of the 2nd half. Yes you're reading that correctly.
Until 4:55 left in the game the score was 40-34. At half-time it was 32-16. So Kentucky scored 8 points in 15 minutes. That is crazy. That's on pace to score 10.66 for the half.
At 40-34, when Cornell cut it to 6, Kentucky missed but got an offensive rebound. Cornell really needed that rebound badly but Kentucky won the game because of their defense and rebounding as crazy as that sounds because they were dunking at will in the first half.
Kentucky got 10 points the lats 1:15 of the game so it's easy to miss how good defensively Cornell was the 2nd half.
However, Kentucky went on an 11-0 run the last 3:33 of the 1st half to make it virtually impossible for Cornell to comeback. Cornell beating Kentucky was impropable, beating them while down 16 at half is virtually impossible although they did a better job than I thought.