Wisconsin, Arizona may be the only two Kentucky busters

It’s the wrong question, of course. Someone can. This is sports. You've still gotta play the game. Sports are unpredictable, which is why we love them, and no sporting event is less predictable than the NCAA tournament. You give 18- to 22-year-olds 40 minutes to battle one another, and sometimes a lesser team can play out of its mind while other times a greater team can play mindlessly. In a single-elimination tournament, the best team doesn’t always win it all. It frequently doesn’t. Ask Larry Johnson’s UNLV team in 1991, or John Wall’s Kentucky team in 2010.

Then again, maybe their thought process was surprisingly cogent, because the two non-Kentucky teams that got No. 1 votes in that preseason poll also happen to be the two teams coaches most often bring up to me as the top teams that could — could — beat Kentucky.

Those teams? Wisconsin, which happens to be the Goliath among all the Davids trying to unseat Kentucky, and Arizona.

These two teams, both of which have the sort of height and physicality down low that’s a prerequisite for being able to hang with the Wildcats’ 7-footers, represent the two diverging philosophies on how to beat Kentucky: You speed up the Wildcats — or you slow them down.

Perhaps the best thing for Kentucky in this year’s bracket is that it’s impossible for it to play both of those teams, since Arizona and Wisconsin are in the same region.

Take Wisconsin. It’s my favorite of the teams that could beat Kentucky. It’s less the Badgers’ personnel and more how those players fit into their style, a style that attacks Kentucky’s one vulnerability. Wisconsin plays extremely slow and hugely efficient basketball. The Badgers rank 347th (out of 351 Division I teams) in tempo, according to KenPom.com. Its average length for an offensive possession is 21.7 seconds. No team in the NCAA tournament takes longer to put up a shot. (Only two teams in all of college basketball take longer in fact.) And when the Badgers put up a shot, it’s never a wasted opportunity. They simply don’t make mistakes. Wisconsin doesn’t turn the ball over (tops in the nation in turnover percentage), doesn’t get its shots blocked (only three teams in Division I get a lower percentage blocked) and makes more of each offensive possession than any team in college basketball.

Wisconsin scores an astounding 1.246 points per possession, tops in the game.

Why could this be bad news for Kentucky? Because if there’s a weakness Kentucky has shown, it’s playing with a lack of energy at times. I’m not talking the lack of energy at the beginning of games, which is something head coach John Calipari has chirped about all season. That won’t be a problem in the NCAA tournament. That was a symptom of playing far less talented teams during the regular season. I don’t care if it’s No. 16 seed Hampton in the first round or No. 1 seed Duke in the title game: These Wildcats are going to come out with guns blazing.

What I’m talking about is how Kentucky can get lulled to sleep by teams that pass the ball in a half-court set . . . then make a bunch of cuts . . . then pass the ball . . . then pass the ball again . . . then run some ball screens . . . then pass the ball . . . then pass the ball . . . then, finally, get the best shot attempt they could possibly get with only a few ticks left on the shot clock. That’s Wisconsin’s offense in a nutshell. No one runs it better. It would limit Kentucky’s possessions and therefore magnify every Kentucky mistake.

Add the fact that every single player in Wisconsin’s rotation can make outside shots and that means Kentucky’s post defense would have to linger on the perimeter more than it’s comfortable doing. Although Willie Cauley-Stein might be the best perimeter-defending 7-footer in college basketball — Calipari had him guarding (and smothering) 6-foot-3 guard KT Harrell, Auburn’s leading scorer, in the SEC tournament — Wisconsin’s strength presents a problem for more post-oriented defenders like Karl-Anthony Towns and Dakari Johnson. Spreading the floor is one way to neutralize Kentucky’s advantage in the post.

That’s why I like Wisconsin as the team to beat among the teams that could beat Kentucky.

So does Auburn coach Bruce Pearl, whose Tigers got smacked in the mouth by Calipari’s Wildcats when they played in the SEC tournament last week. He marveled at the fact that Kentucky has few vulnerabilities.

“They’re a very complete team,” Pearl said of Kentucky. “They have got everything it takes. They make shots. They can do things inside and outside. They’re dominating from the foul line, both in attempts and finishing. They’re unselfish. They defend. It’s the best team I’ve ever coached against.”

I asked him how he would construct the perfect team to match up with Kentucky.

“It would need to be a team that would be a big, physical club that could be able to withstand their size and their dominance,” Pearl said. “It would have to be a great team. Wisconsin played against them last year, and Wisconsin returned everybody. It’s just that Kentucky returned almost everybody and then added to that.”

There’s also this: I asked Frank Kaminsky and Sam Dekker about the possibility of a Final Four rematch with Kentucky, the team that beat Wisconsin in a Final Four nail-biter a year ago. Both players said that loss stuck with them and that they were hungry for another shot.

Here’s what Kaminsky told me: “It was one of the more motivating things that’s ever happened to me in my basketball career. To just get so close to what we’ve always worked for and come up short in the way we did — it’s one of those things, as much as you don’t want it to, it sticks in the back of your mind. There’s nothing you can really do to get it out of there.”

Motivation like that means something.

But Arizona is an intriguing case as well, and for very different reasons than Wisconsin.

First is the experience factor. Arizona has a backcourt of upperclassmen (senior point guard T.J. McConnell and junior off-guard Gabe York). The Wildcats have a frontcourt of upperclassmen, too: junior power forward Brandon Ashley and junior center Kaleb Tarczewski. But I think the fact that Kentucky is the youngest team in the NCAA tournament field doesn’t really matter. Last season counts as at least two seasons of experience to me: The hype leading into the season, the letdown of the regular season when Kentucky appeared on the bubble to even make the tournament, then the incredible March run where it fulfilled all its immense promise. Plus the pressure of playing in the NCAA tournament is similar to the pressure of setting foot on the Kentucky campus as a basketball player in that basketball-nutty state. These players came here because they wanted that sort of pressure.

More important is that Arizona is one of the few teams in the country — with Duke and perhaps Wisconsin as the only others — that have the elite, NBA-level talent that can put them in the same arena as Kentucky. Stanley Johnson is a surefire lottery pick, but don’t forget that Tarczewski, Ashley and Rondae Hollis-Jefferson — not to mention freshman reserve center Dusan Ristic — are all NBA prospects, too.

But the case for Arizona focuses on two things: The fact its defense is nearly as dominant as Kentucky’s historically great defense — Arizona’s pack-line unit is ranked third in KenPom’s defensive efficiency rankings — and the fact it’ll speed opponents up with an offense that ranks 30th in the nation in average length of possession.

But I don’t buy the speed-up theory that I’ve heard from some coaches. A quicker game means Kentucky has more possessions, which means Kentucky’s inevitable mistakes aren’t as magnified. Plus Kentucky plays its best when it’s playing with energy, has absurd depth that means players won’t get tired in a fast-paced game and has an offense that works its best in transition.

Still, Arizona hasn’t lost since Feb. 7, and its three losses this season have been by a combined four possessions. Arizona might not beat Kentucky, but you better be damn sure it would give Kentucky a game.

Like Wisconsin, Arizona rarely gets its shots blocked on offense, which would offer a counter to Kentucky’s 7-footers. The biggest concern for Arizona? Its ability to make threes. Only 13 teams in college basketball take fewer 3-pointers than Arizona.

“You got to make shots on a team with that kind of size, that kind of depth,” Mike Anderson, Arkansas’ head coach, replied when I asked about the perfect type of team to beat Kentucky. “If a team’s going to beat them, you got to make shots as well and you got to match their energy, especially on the glass. ... You got to match the physicality, keep them off the boards, keep them off the free-throw line. I think you got to make them make tough shots.”

“The games where they have been close,” Anderson continued, “teams shot the ball well. Teams have kind of kept them off the glass. Teams have got really physical with them.”

Among coaches, there have been a few other teams that come up as possible Kentucky-beaters:

• Gonzaga, which has great size and a bevy of shooters.

• Duke, which lacks depth but has the best offensive big man in college basketball in Jahlil Okafor (if the Blue Devils want to have a chance, Duke would need its sometimes-streaky backcourt to make perimeter shots).

• Virginia, but only if 100-percent healthy.

• Perhaps Notre Dame, one of the nation’s best shooting teams (but a defensive disaster).

If I could throw out my own deep sleeper in Kentucky’s region: 11-seed Texas, which (like Kentucky a year ago) recently was doubted as an NCAA tournament team. Texas has the length to compete with Kentucky, and the elite talent as well. Remember that in December Texas played Kentucky to a draw for a half. It’s the longest of long shots, given how Texas has bumbled through its season, but if things suddenly clicked, it’s a possibility.

Do I think Kentucky will lose? No. My bracket has the Wildcats going 40-0. Do I think they could lose, though? Yes. But only if they run into the perfectly constructed team playing a near-perfect game while Kentucky plays a B-minus (or worse) game.

But do I want Kentucky to lose? Hell, no. I don’t have strong feelings one way or another for Big Blue Nation. But I do have strong feelings about witnessing history in real time. And unless some other team can do the unexpected, that’s exactly what we’ll be witnessing over the next few weeks.

Email Reid Forgrave at reidforgrave@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter @reidforgrave.