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Armour: C'mon, it's Kentucky. Words will never hurt them

Nancy Armour
USA TODAY Sports
The Kentucky Wildcats celebrate.

CLEVELAND — West Virginia's trash talk failed even more miserably than its vaunted press.

If someone is going to beat Kentucky — and it's looking increasingly unlikely that that's going to happen this year — it's going to take more than words. Like maybe more field goals than fouls, something the Mountaineers couldn't manage.

"That's what happens when people try and trash talk to us," Aaron Harrison said.

"We wanted to prove a point to them. We wanted to make a statement."

A day after Daxter Miles Jr. brashly predicted that he and the Mountaineers would hand Kentucky its first loss, the only blemish after the Wildcats' 78-39 rout was West Virginia's severely bruised ego. It couldn't hang with Kentucky for even five minutes, let alone give the Wildcats a serious scare.

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As for Miles, his oh-fer showing — no points on 0-for-3 shooting and 0-for-2 from the line — apparently made him realize the folly of shooting off his mouth because he was channeling Marshawn Lynch after the game.

"Kentucky played great," Miles said. Over and over and over again.

Look, it's fine to be confident. Necessary, even, when facing a team like Kentucky, which has two starting lineups that are the envy of pretty much every NBA team. But the fine line between confident and cocky becomes a chasm when you cross it, and the Mountaineers tumbled right into it.

Take a look at what Miles said ahead of Thursday night's game:

"Salute to them getting up to 36-0, but tomorrow they're gonna be 36-1. They're gonna be 36-1," Miles said.

That alone probably would have been enough to raise Kentucky's ire, but Miles wasn't done. No, he had to go and call the Wildcats out.

"I don't think they've played a team like us," he said. "To me, they don't play hard. To me, they don't play as hard as we play. Nobody is invincible, so their time will come, and I think we're going to pull it out."

One of the most impressive things about Kentucky's run this year — aside from its collection of talent, of course — is how easily the Wildcats have tuned out the distractions. As gifted as Kentucky is, the Wildcats are a very young team — except for Willie Cauley-Stein, a junior, everyone who played Thursday until the last 40 seconds was either a freshman or sophomore — and they have spent six months in a fishbowl that gets smaller and smaller with every win.

Praise them or bash them, they've played as if they'd heard not a word.

Until now.

The Wildcats bristled at Miles' comments when they were told of them Wednesday, and they came out Thursday night itching to settle the score. Harrison scored 10 as Kentucky opened the game with an 18-2 run, effectively ending the game before the under-12 timeout.

"(The comments) kind of got us ready," Cauley-Stein said. "We came out firing on all cylinders, and that just makes it look worse."

West Virginia prides itself on its physicality, but Kentucky bumped and bruised from the start. It never gave West Virginia the chance to run its stifling press, not allowing the Mountaineers to get off shots. Or, on the rare occasions West Virginia did, capitalizing on its size advantage and vacuuming up the rebounds.

And, just for fun, Kentucky took a page out of West Virginia's playbook and ran a press of its own.

"The pace, the tempo, they controlled the tempo and the pace the whole game," Devin Williams said. "The only way we going to be successful is us controlling the tempo and the pace."

That's the thing: Miles may have thought he was doing the Mountaineers a favor, showing they weren't afraid of big, bad Kentucky. But poke the bear too much, and it's going to bite back.

Hard.

"Careful what you wish for," Cauley-Stein said.

It's easy to take shots at Kentucky. Fail to make them in the game, however, and they're no more than empty words.

Follow columnist Nancy Armour on Twitter @nrarmour.

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