Everything you ought to know from college basketball's Tuesday night …
Game of the night: Kentucky's bid for perfection stays intact against LSU.
The Wildcats exited the Pete Maravich Center 24-0 on Tuesday night after a buzzer-beating Keith Hornsby 3-pointer rimmed out to give them a 71-69 win.
But boy, did they have to fight to get the win. The shocking thing about this is that Kentucky seemed to have this game totally in control. With a 13-point lead and 12 minutes left, it seemed like the Wildcats were ready to go on a run and win by 20. They had all the momentum after a 3-pointer by Andrew Harrison and a few major dunks from Willie Cauley-Stein.
But then Josh Gray hit a big 3-pointer to stem the tide. Followed by Karl-Anthony Towns -- who had played one of his better games of the season prior to that point -- picking up a technical foul for hanging on the rim. After that tech, the Tigers went on 14-0 run that was laden with offensive rebounding for the Tigers and bad shots for the Wildcats to take a six-point lead.
But it just wasn't enough. The Wildcats clamped down on defense and only allowed LSU to score three points in the final 7:30, and Towns made a hook shot with a minute left to give the Wildcats the lead for good. Then he did this as John Calipari was talking about his relative immaturity for hanging on the rim, which was probably less than ideal timing:
That was one of the last two big ones on Kentucky's schedule. The Wildcats now have a 66.4 percent chance of going unbeaten according to KenPom's game projections. The biggest chance remaining of a loss is at Georgia on March 3. That's the game it'll likely come down to.
Hey, that's a good win: Georgetown puts a road beatdown on Seton Hall 86-67.
This one could honestly fit into either of these two categories. Becuase don't mistake it, this is a horrid loss for the Pirates. But more than that, let's call this a good win for a Hoyas team that needed it to consolidate a solid at-large résumé. D'Vauntes Smith-Rivera had 23 points on 7-12 shooting from the field, and Isaac Copeland had 20 of his own. That was a loss the Hoyas basically just needed to avoid to stay on the right side of the bubble, and they did so with gusto.
On the other hand, man is this a bad one for a Seton Hall team that has three road games coming against Providence, Villanova and St. John's in its next games, plus a late-season road game against this same Hoya team. It's hard to envision the Pirates making the NCAA tournament with 11 league losses, which is exactly what they're on pace for at this point. And that's a shame considering how great the Hall's start to the season was.
Oh, that's a bad loss: Memphis is without its best player in Austin Nichols. Without him, there's just no one for the offense to flow through. So hey, I get why the team would struggle.
But a loss to East Carolina? That's still pretty unacceptable regardless of who you're missing. The Pirates were 218th in KenPom coming into that game with only one other top-200 win. Yeah, this one is bad, and basically extinguishes any sort of plausible hope the Tigers had to run the table and potentially get an at-large bid.
I don't think Josh Pastner is in trouble or anything, but he needs to do something to jumpstart this offense that just scored .82 points per possession against a defense that had been giving up 1.04 per possession prior to this game.
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