The latest game in the Kentucky-UCLA basketball series is an important one. Here’s why.
This weekend’s basketball game in Madison Square Garden will give UCLA an opportunity to do something the Bruins have never done before: tie the all-time series with Kentucky.
Going into Saturday’s game, the two storied programs have met on the court 15 times. UK has won eight of those matchups. UCLA has won seven. And, ever since the teams first played more than 70 years ago, Kentucky has led the head-to-head series.
It helped the Cats that the first three games against the Bruins went their way. All three of those meetings — in 1951, 1959 and 1961 — pitted Adolph Rupp against John Wooden, by any measure two of the biggest names in college basketball history. Those games also came after Rupp had already won multiple national titles and before Wooden would elevate UCLA to the unprecedented hoops juggernaut it became by the mid-1960s.
Since those three games, the two programs have met a dozen times, nearly every one of those contests remaining close until the end, all 12 involving at least one team ranked in the top-15 nationally, with eight of the games featuring two Top 25 teams. (The rankings trend will continue Saturday. Kentucky comes in at No. 13 with UCLA ranked 16th nationally).
And the Bruins have never evened the series with the Cats.
Since those first two games in the ’50s, UCLA has had just two chances to tie the Cats in head-to-head matchups, but Kentucky won both of those games — in 1998 and 2017, both in the NCAA Tournament — to extend its series lead each time.
A victory Saturday would also put UCLA in select company on the Kentucky all-time list.
Of the 46 college basketball programs that UK has met at least 10 times on the court, only three hold a .500 or better record against the Wildcats. The team with the best mark, by far, is fellow blue-blood North Carolina, which boasts a 25-17 record against Kentucky. The other two would probably take a while for even the most astute UK basketball trivia experts to answer correctly.
The Saint Louis Billikens are the only other team that has played Kentucky at least 10 times to have a winning record against the Wildcats, going 9-8 all-time in those matchups. Only one of those games — a 27-point UK win in the 1998 NCAA Tournament — has happened in the past 50 years, however. All of Saint Louis’ victories over the Cats came between 1948 and 1964, when the Billikens were often well-regarded nationally. Saint Louis did knock off No. 1-ranked Kentucky twice in the early ’50s, and the Billikens beat the second-ranked Cats in 1964.
Marquette has evenly split 14 all-time matchups with UK, including eliminating the Wildcats from the NCAA Tournament in the teams’ last three meetings: in 1994, 2004 and 2008. Ten of the games in that series have come in the NCAA Tournament, with Marquette winning six of those.
UCLA can add its name to that .500-or-better list with a win Saturday.
The Bruins, who have the most NCAA titles with 11, are sometimes classified as a fifth “blue blood” — depending on who’s doing the classifying — but college basketball aficionados generally agree that four programs unquestionably hold that status: UK, Duke, Kansas and North Carolina.
As previously stated, UNC holds a 25-17 edge all-time over the Cats, though Kentucky has won seven of the last 11 meetings in that series. UK has a 12-11 all-time advantage over Duke, with the Blue Devils winning five of the last six meetings and nine of 11 since the 1978 NCAA title game. The Cats have a 24-10 all-time advantage over Kansas.
Kentucky vs. UCLA
The Wildcats vs. the Bruins often pits two of the best teams in the country against each other, and this year’s installment will once again feature a couple of squads with seemingly realistic Final Four aspirations — 13th-ranked Kentucky and 16th-ranked UCLA.
A look back at five memorable matchups in the series …
5. 1994 John Wooden Classic
The early-December meeting between the two programs in Anaheim featured No. 3 Kentucky against No. 5 UCLA in the Cats’ first regular-season game on the West Coast in 35 years. UK led the game at halftime, but Rick Pitino was called for a technical foul in the first minute of the second half, and it would remain a tense one from there. Kentucky was ahead most of the way — and UK was up six points with a little more than three minutes left — but late miscues ultimately sunk the Cats. UCLA’s Ed O’Bannon led all scorers with 26 points, and J.R. Henderson hit two free throws with less than a second on the clock to give the Bruins an 82-81 victory.
UCLA went on to win the NCAA title that season, the Bruins’ 11th championship but only NCAA crown outside of the Wooden era. Kentucky lost to North Carolina in the Elite Eight, but the Cats returned the following season to win their first national title in 18 years.
4. 1998 NCAA Sweet 16
This game isn’t as memorable as it is important — one more step for the Kentucky Wildcats on their march to the 1998 national championship in Tubby Smith’s first season as head coach. The two sides had met early in the season, with UK pulling out a 66-62 victory in the Puerto Rico Shootout. This one wouldn’t be nearly as close. No. 2-seeded Kentucky immediately jumped out to a double-digit lead over the sixth-seeded Bruins and never looked back. The Cats led by 17 points and halftime and ultimately defeated UCLA, 94-68, before knocking off Duke with an improbable comeback two days later to earn a spot in the Final Four (and, later, the program’s seventh national championship). This is the third-largest final margin in the history of the UK-UCLA series and one of only two games in the past 70 years decided by more than 11 points.
3. 2017 NCAA Sweet 16
UCLA had come into Rupp Arena and knocked off the Wildcats earlier that season, so Kentucky came into this one looking for a little retribution. More importantly, the Cats were looking to advance in the NCAA Tournament. They got the job done on both counts, beating the Bruins, 86-75, and UK freshman De’Aaron Fox turned in a spectacular effort — 39 points without a single three-pointer, going 13-for-20 from the field and 13-for-15 from the free-throw line. UCLA was arguably underseeded as a No. 3 — the Bruins were ranked eighth nationally in the final AP poll — but it made no difference on this day. Only three UK players — Dan Issel, Jack Givens and Tayshaun Prince — have ever scored more points in an NCAA Tournament game than Fox did against the Bruins, a performance that would surely be more memorable if not for what happened two days later, when Luke Maye shot North Carolina over Kentucky and into the Final Four, ending the Wildcats’ season.
2. The rout of 2014
This CBS Sports Classic game in December had stakes much lower than the two preceding it on this list, but what Kentucky basketball fan could possibly forget this performance? Anyone getting to their TVs a little late surely thought what they were seeing on screen was a typo. At one point in the first half, the Cats held a 24-0 lead. The halftime score: 41-7. Seven! The Cats coasted — relatively speaking — after halftime and ended up with an 83-44 victory. Devin Booker led Kentucky with 19 points, what would turn out to be his career-high scoring total in his only season of college basketball. UK blocked 13 shots, and UCLA went 26.8 percent from the field, missing its first 17 shots of the game.
Kentucky, of course, won its first 38 games that season, a magical run that ended with a loss to Wisconsin in the Final Four, two days and two victories shy of a possible 40-0 record.
1. 1975 NCAA title game
The first of three NCAA Tournament meetings between these two programs and the only one to occur with a national championship on the line, it’s going to take an awful lot for any game between the Cats and Bruins to top this one in importance. And the high stakes were only part of the story.
Two days before UCLA met Kentucky for the 1975 title in San Diego, legendary coach John Wooden told his team that this game would be his last, later announcing that decision to the public. Wooden had coached the Bruins for 27 seasons and, to that point, had won nine national titles. On Kentucky’s side, Joe B. Hall was in his third season in charge of the Cats. UCLA came into the game at No. 1. Kentucky was No. 2.
The final result: Bruins 92, Wildcats 85, a game in which Wooden played only six players — four of them for the full 40 minutes — and, true to his word, retired afterward. Many UK fans who were around at the time still swear that the NCAA wasn’t going to let the Wizard of Westwood go out a loser — UK was whistled for 29 fouls to UCLA’s 19, though both teams shot exactly 25 free throws — and there were tense moments throughout, including one in the second half where Bruins forward Dave Meyers was called for a technical foul and the normally mild-mannered Wooden had to be physically (but delicately) directed back to the bench by an official.
“I saw the power that John Wooden had,” Hall told the Los Angeles Times several years ago. “I walked to the scorer’s table and the referee turned and pointed his finger at me and said, ‘You get back on that bench!’ He talked to me like a stepchild.”
It was the final game for UK great Kevin Grevey, who scored 34 points but came up short of a national championship. Hall would get his three years later, when a core of Cats who were freshmen for that UCLA game — Jack Givens, James Lee, Mike Phillips and Rick Robey — led Kentucky past Duke for the 1978 title.
In the storied history of UK basketball, this is one of those games that haunts the Cats the most.
Saturday
No. 13 Kentucky vs. No. 16 UCLA
What: CBS Sports Classic
Where: Madison Square Garden in New York City
When: About 5:15 p.m.
TV: CBS-27
Radio: WLAP-AM 630, WBUL-FM 98.1
Records: Kentucky 7-2, UCLA 8-2
Series: Kentucky leads 8-7.
Last meeting: UCLA won 83-75 on Dec. 23, 2017, at the CBS Sports Classic in New Orleans.
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