Jerry Tipton on UK basketball

Kentucky scored the game’s first eight points and steadily pulled away to a 31-14 halftime lead.
Stingy defense discombobulated Ole Miss from tipoff to halftime. The Cats led by as much as 31-8 before Ole Miss scored the final six points of the half.
Coming off a 26.8-percent shooting performance at LSU last weekend, Ole Miss actually slumped further in the opening 20 minutes. The Rebels made only six of 25 shots (24 percent) and missed all 10 of their threep-0point shots.
Warren, the team’s leading scorer (15.2 ppg), led the way, so to speak, by making only one of eight shots (zero for five from three-point range).
Two three-point misses by Warren helped Kentucky get off to fast start.
Ramon Harris’s three-pointer (his second since the Louisville game on Jan. 5) gave UK an 8-0 lead. That prompted an Ole Miss timeout with 18:10 left.
The Rebels went inside to Dwayne Curtis, their center and the player that put the strength in Ole Miss’s supposed inside strength. He got fouled on his low-post attempt.
But then Ole Miss went back to firing away from the perimeter. The Rebels did not attempt another two-pointer until the 15:28 mark. David Huertas, a transfer from Florida, missed a fast-break layup. Jermey Parnell nearly fumbled away the rebound before Huertas grabbed the loose ball and laid it home. That marked the Rebels’ first basket.
Ole Miss had only four points until Warren hit a pull-up in the lane with 5:43 left. That marked the Rebels’ first points in exactly seven minutes.
Kentucky made 12 of 22 shots. Except for Harris’s three-pointer, the big three (Patterson, Bradley and Crawford) scored all of UK’s points in the first 11 minutes.
Then Stevenson, who dreamed about a 200-point game on Tuesday, scored seven straight points to break the monotony.