Kentucky clamps up Auburn and earns ugly 63-56 victory on the road

[Matt Dillon]

For Kentucky to have homecourt advantage through the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament, they needed to get a win over Auburn on Thursday. A loss to the Tigers would be their worst defeat of the season that would fall into the Quad 3 category. Auburn has been on the struggle bus in SEC play, for Kentucky, they needed to make sure Larry Vickers’ team didn’t get off of it on Thursday.

Fortunately for Kentucky, they got the 63-56 win over Auburn, handling business on the road to move to 21-8 (8-7 SEC) on the season.

Kentucky got out to a fast start on The Plains, and for the most part, Amelia Hassett was the reason why. After the Tigers scored the first bucket of the contest, a Kentucky 10-0 run highlighted by back-to-back threes from Hassett gave the Cats a quick 10-2 lead to start the ballgame. Through one, Kentucky led 19-11.

Kentucky clamps up Auburn and earns ugly 63-56 victory on the road - On3

[alakat2]

Tonie Morgan was off her game with so many turnovers. Cats looked uninspired much of the 2nd half. Maybe Brooks didn’t want to run up the score on his old friend Vickers, as Strack didn’t play as many minutes as usual. Also, Boone pretty much went scoreless while making zero threes. Hassett was great shooting the 3-ball.