For one day, at least, Kentucky looked like a team.
The Wildcats found the open man on offense. They hustled on defense.
They played as if they liked each other.
“It goes to show what kind of team we can be when we show up and play for 40 minutes,” guard Keith Bogans said.
Bogans’ game-high 21 points led the fourth-seeded Wildcats to an 83-68 victory over No. 13 seed Valparaiso in an East Regional opener Thursday at the Edward Jones Dome.
The Crusaders, making their sixth NCAA appearance in the last seven years, had a five-game winning streak snapped. Valpo is 2-6 in the NCAA tournament, with both wins coming in 1998.
Given the way Kentucky has played the last few weeks, this might qualify as the NCAA tournament’s first upset.
The Wildcats arrived in town in apparent disarray. They had dropped four of their last nine games, including an uninspired 70-57 loss to NIT-bound South Carolina in the Southeastern Conference tournament semifinal.
That result, at the end of a season wracked by suspensions and dissension, seemed to foretell an early tournament exit for the Wildcats.
But this was a different bunch than the one that skulked out of the Georgia Dome in Atlanta last weekend. When the Wildcats returned to Lexington, coach Tubby Smith called them together and told them they were about to embark on a new season.
It’s a coaching cliche, spouted on campuses across the country. But Kentucky took it to heart.
“Going into the tournament, we’ve decided to be positive with one another and support one another,” senior guard J.P. Blevins said.
Few needed the support more than Bogans, who had struggled mightily with his perimeter shot as the season wore down, hitting only two of his last 24 three-point attempts. But he was 4-for-5 from beyond the arc Thursday, and Valpo could find no answer. The Crusaders trailed by 18 points at the half and never closed within single digits.
“I always go into a game thinking I’m going to have a good shooting day,” said Bogans, a 6-foot-5-inch junior guard who declared for the NBA draft last spring, then decided to come back to school.
“It hasn’t happened that much this year, but I felt good today.”
Kentucky shot 49.1 percent from the floor. At the defensive end, they limited the Crusaders to 39.7 percent shooting and harried them into 19 turnovers.
“Those turnovers were a result of Kentucky’s good defensive pressure,” Valpo coach Homer Drew said.
“That was very uncharacteristic of our basketball team.”
Valpo star Lubos Barton, who was covered by Tayshaun Prince for most of the game, shot 2-for-9 from the floor and had five turnovers.
“He forced me to drive inside, and every time I threw the ball up I had my shots contested,” Barton said.
Center Raitis Grafs led the Crusaders with 21 points and eight rebounds.
The Crusaders didn’t quit, despite their 18-point halftime deficit. They outscored Kentucky 45-42 and went home to Indiana with their heads high.
“I was very proud of our team in the second half,” Drew said. “We did a much better job of getting position and rebounding the basketball.”
“We did not want to be embarrassed down here,” Crusaders guard Milo Stovall said. “We just wanted to play hard.”
