DeMarcus Cousins won SEC player of the week this past week for putting up 18-12 against Hartford and 18-18 against Louisville. I’m okay with that. The 18-18 game was one of the best performances by a Kentucky player against Louisville since the series resumed in 1983. I’m okay with any accolades DeMarcus gets for his play.

But the real MVP of the Louisville game was Eric Bledsoe.

Everybody remembers the forearm shiver by Cousins in the face of Jared Swopshire. But, speaking purely in terms of the 40 minutes of play and ignoring the extracurricular stuff in the pregame, the tone was set eight seconds in. Louisville had already come out with a ton of swagger, and on the first possession of the game, Reginald Delk shoved Eric Bledsoe into a screen. Bledsoe ran into the guy with enough velocity that a foul was called. Only it didn’t stop with the foul. Delk started yapping, clearly part of the Pitino gameplan of getting into the Kentucky players’ heads. But Bledsoe didn’t back down. He yapped back. It got so intense that Coach Calipari had to take Bledsoe out of the game and put in Ramon Harris. Then Cal said some words that are being discussed all over the web. I can’t read lips or even tell who he was talking to, but somebody was going to kick somebody else’s ass after the game and somebody got the wrong guy. Bledsoe showed Delk and the rest of the Louisville players that neither he nor his teammates would back down from any kind of intimidation tactics. Cousins’ forearm was the physical representation of that statement. If Bledsoe had been in there for that play, there would have been a fight, there’s no doubt in my mind about it.

It didn’t end there, though. As the game progressed and everybody cooled down, I don’t think Kentucky ever came down from the adrenaline rush at the start of the game. While Kentucky had previously done a great job against zone defenses, the shots didn’t fall against Louisville’s zone, and once the shots weren’t falling, the offense became stagnant. Nobody attacked the zone and instead of passing the ball to players, they passed to areas on the court where they expected players to be. People were zigging when they should have been zagging, and eventually, Louisville took the lead. Now this is the part when John Wall took over. Magic Johnson would have said “Winning time is John Wall time!” But it started with Eric Bledsoe. Actually, let me backtrack. Louisville only went up by a point, but they could have gone up by a lot more had it not been for Eric Bledsoe. I mentioned that nobody attacked the zone in the early part of the second half, but Bledsoe did. He dribbled into a hole in the zone and buried a couple of midrange shots. If those shots don’t go down, UK is looking at a scoring drought that could have buried them.

Now then, let me go back to the John Wall sequence of plays. He made three straight shots to kick off the big run, but the two buckets that came in transition actually came off of Eric Bledsoe getting a steal and then another 50/50 ball after a Daniel Orton block. John Wall deserves the credit for rising to the occasion when the outcome was in doubt, but Bledsoe deserves credit for the plays that don’t show up in the box score.

Finally, the final five minutes could have been a lot more interesting had somebody other than Eric Bledsoe been shooting free throws. On a day where good free throw shooters were missing their free throws, Bledsoe stepped up and hit six of six, all in clutch situations. I have no problem with Bledsoe shooting free throws in the clutch if John Wall can’t get the ball. Bledsoe has ice water in the veins.

I hope the SEC teams try the Louisville gameplan on Bledsoe. He’ll make them pay.

Thanks for reading.