No. 23 Kentucky’s Uk Basketball Schedule reaches its final preseason stop on Wednesday, when the Wildcats host UCF at Rupp Arena in their third and last exhibition game. Tipoff is set for 6 p.m. ET on SEC Network, and this one closes the book on Kentucky’s preseason tuneups before the games start counting for real.
The reason this matchup draws attention now is simple: Kentucky comes in unbeaten after two exhibitions, while UCF arrives having already been tested twice. Kentucky opened with a 69-49 win over Little Rock, then followed by beating No. 19 Texas Tech 76-65. Against Little Rock, Milan Momcilovic led the way with 16 points and Alex Wilkins added 11, while Kentucky hit 12 of 28 shots from behind the arc. Against Texas Tech, five Kentucky players scored in double figures, with Momcilovic and Malachi Moreno each putting up 15 points, Mason Williams scoring 14, Wilkins finishing with 13 and Ousmane N’Diaye adding 10.
UCF’s path has been less clean. The Knights opened with an 84-81 loss at LSU, where Dior Johnson scored 18 points, then responded by beating Rollins College in their most recent exhibition. Johnson had 19 points and seven rebounds in that game. Johnny Dawkins, in his 11th season as UCF’s head coach in Orlando, has a team that went 21-12 last season and reached the NCAA Tournament before losing to UCLA in the first round. That makes Wednesday a useful measuring stick for both sides, but especially for Kentucky, which now has to decide how much it learned before the regular season begins.
The question left after this final exhibition is not whether Kentucky can score in spurts — it already has shown that — but how those performances settle into a rotation once the results start to count.
