LEXINGTON, Ky. — Each of the following words must be tempered by two fairly important facts: Louisville is barely a functional Division I team at the moment and the Cardinals hardly endeavored to defend Jacob Toppin, or really anyone in a Kentucky jersey, on Saturday afternoon. Because of those not-insignificant details, one could argue there is nothing of substance to be gleaned from Toppin’s big day or the Wildcats’ 86-63 win over their hapless rivals, who’ve now lost at home to Bellarmine, Wright State, Appalachian State and Lipscomb and fallen by an average of 24 points against seven major-conference opponents. Any other outcome would’ve been a sign of impending doom for a Kentucky team that has struggled against every good team it faced.
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And still, it’s not true the Cats (9-4) got nothing but relief from comfortably winning a game they should’ve won comfortably. Toppin’s smiling face afterward revealed at least one important thing that came from this unfair fight.
“I’ve been in a rough patch that I needed to get out of,” he said after hitting 10 of 15 shots, scoring 24 points and grabbing seven rebounds in 35 minutes against Louisville. “I had a lot of support from my teammates and my coaching staff, and it just feels good to be back to my old self. I feel good mentally and physically, so we just move forward now.”
Three nights earlier at Missouri, Toppin and his team appeared to be moving backward. Hyped as a potential breakout star — the headliner of a rollicking summer exhibition tour in the Bahamas — Toppin scored zero points in a lopsided loss to the Tigers on Wednesday, the low point of a miserable slump. Before Saturday, he’d made just 5 of 20 shots for 13 total points in 88 minutes across his previous four outings. He was being crushed by the weight of expectation and criticism, wilting under the intense heat of the spotlight at Kentucky.
“I was messed up mentally,” Toppin said. “I wasn’t thinking right. Even when I was on the court, I wasn’t fully on the court. It was really hard for me. Honestly, I’d probably reached rock bottom. I just tried to focus on climbing back out of the hole I was in.”
You don’t do that alone. Point guard Sahvir Wheeler checked on Toppin daily, asking where his head was, and star freshman Cason Wallace and junior center Lance Ware also checked in frequently. Toppin sought outside advice, too, including that of renowned sports psychologist Bob Rotella, a longtime consultant for Kentucky. But what Toppin really needed was the support of his coach, and John Calipari gave it to him. Calipari called Toppin to his hotel room the night before that Missouri game to offer a hug and a pep talk.
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“Do you know how much I love you and how much I want you to do well? But I can’t do this for you, and you’ve got to get in a different frame of mind,” Calipari remembers telling Toppin, who promptly laid another egg in Columbia, where he also displayed the kind of lethargic body language that suggested he might just be checked out on the season. “What’s the word above awful?” Calipari joked Saturday.
“We had a great talk (but) obviously it’s not going to happen right away, and we knew that,” Toppin said. “So after the game, he actually called me back into the office and we had another talk. He was checking on me. I said, ‘I’m OK, Coach. It’s not going to happen overnight. Just keep trusting in me and I’ll figure it out.’”
So Calipari did an unexpected thing Saturday: He started Toppin, who’d come off the bench the previous two games, against the Cardinals.
“Was I surprised? No, because he was the first person who was looking out for me when I was down,” Toppin said. “I didn’t go to him; he told me to come to him so we could talk.”
Toppin responded to his coach’s vote of confidence Saturday by scoring nine points in the first seven minutes to stake UK to a 21-6 lead that grew as large as 27 points and was never fewer than eight the rest of the game. He started out with layups and floaters and slowly migrated farther and farther from the basket, regaining confidence with every swish, eventually showing off the full array of shot-making that in August had NBA scouts buzzing about a bouncy 6-foot-9 forward with skills.
“I just felt that I needed to do that with all the stuff we had been doing,” Calipari said of starting Toppin. “We’ve done a lot of work — and it’s not been on the court. You had guys feeling the weight of the world. I respect these kids. Playing here, it’s really hard. Really rewarding, but it’s hard. There’s a tax you pay to play here and coach here. There’s a tax. You’ve got to be thick-skinned and tough.”
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That doesn’t mean they always need tough love, though. Calipari is a screamer, a stomper, a famously in-your-face admonisher who freely acknowledges his style and this stage are “not for everybody.” But this is the team he has for the next three months — “I wish we were a little bit tougher, but I love the pieces,” he said Saturday — and that means he’ll have to adjust accordingly. Not everybody responds to his preferred brand of howling correction. Oscar Tshiebwe, the reigning national player of the year, who had 24 points and 14 boards against Louisville, recently told his coach as much.
“Coach, you gotta help these kids,” he recalls saying to Calipari after a preseason top-five team lost to Michigan State, Gonzaga, UCLA and Missouri before New Year’s. “They need somebody who can tell them something good sometimes when they’re having difficulty. But if you want to be so hard on them, sometimes you’ll really mess up their minds. You’ll make it worse. And Coach came out and now he started motivating them boys. ‘You good, man!’ Now they start stepping up because he’s more positive.”
It certainly had an impact on Toppin, who felt like he was being swallowed up by negativity. The most important thing he heard in recent days was that tough times don’t last, but tough people do. That it can’t rain forever and the sun is coming. Rotella told him that, and to think about a time in his life when he was the happiest playing basketball. Locate that “happy place,” Rotella told him, and go there in the locker room.
“Today before the game, I really focused mentally on finding that spot,” which was a playground back home in Brooklyn with his friends. “Just hooping, because that’s where I’m carefree and worried about nothing, just playing. So I really just focused on how I could get there during the game and that’s where I went.”
Tshiebwe also helped him with a word of advice: Think about three things you want to do well in a game and attack those. For Tshiebwe, it’s running, rebounding and finishing strong around the rim. Even if a team takes one of those away, he just leans into the other two and therefore can still feel like a valuable member of the team. Toppin decided his three things should have nothing to do with offense. They’re rebounding, defending and making all-out hustle plays.
“I actually watched film on Tyler Herro yesterday and how he played off-ball defense, and it helped a lot,” Toppin said. “I saw that he didn’t stop moving his feet, so in the game, I was thinking about that film and how I’ve got to bounce, bounce, bounce, and that energy will attract more energy. Really, just playing defense, doing the hustle plays, helped with my offense.”
It took his mind off the pressure of making shots. Toppin was the primary defender on former five-star recruit Brandon Huntley-Hatfield, who scored just two points and had three turnovers in the final 25 minutes Saturday. Afterward, Louisville coach Kenny Payne, the longtime Calipari assistant who received a warm welcome from the Rupp Arena crowd in his first visit with the Cardinals, acknowledged that he thought Toppin could be attacked based on recent results.
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“What I was hoping to do was go at him with Brandon, and I think what Brandon found out is that he is an elite athlete with the way he moves,” Payne said. “He is a high-level player and he is capable of dominating a game.”
The question now is whether Toppin and the rest of his teammates can build on the positive vibes of a blowout victory and hold on to their confidence when adversity inevitably returns against a brutal upcoming SEC schedule. Toppin said he aims to stay “mellow,” even-keeled in the good and bad times. Tshiebwe suggested deleting social media to aid in that pursuit.
“I tell him, ‘Jacob, stay focused.’ The problem with him is every little thing he hears from the outside affects his mind,” Tshiebwe said. “He’s gotta be mentally strong, because in this journey, not everybody is gonna say good things about you. I tell him, ‘Stay focused, get off social media.’ I deleted social media off my phone. Social media is a killer of our joy sometimes when we’re going through tough times, because the things people are saying sometimes affect your mind, gonna break your heart. You’re having a good day and you hear something and go, ‘Come on, man, why would somebody say something like this?’ But to avoid something like that, don’t go look at it. Keep your balance.”
The clear-headed version of Toppin is “the Jacob I love,” Tshiebwe added. Toppin hopes that by finding his way out of the darkness, he can help some of his teammates who are still stuck there.
“I don’t want to put anybody out there,” Toppin said, “but we have some people struggling, and I’m always looking out for that, because I’ve been through mental struggles.”
As much as Calipari’s head remains in the sand about how his team should play — he scoffed again Saturday at the notion that it go faster, with better spacing, and shoot more 3s, suggesting that it actually slow down and grind it out offensively instead — he does seem at least to recognize the need for a change in tone.
“It’s not life and death,” he said. “We got punched in the mouth and we’re still alive. I’ve been spending half of my time working on guys mentally and getting them in a different frame of mind.”
If nothing else, then, a rivalry romp and roaring Rupp might have been just the thing this team needed. Or the first thing, anyway.
(Top photo: Jordan Prather / USA Today)
