Andrija Jelavic pushes back on Mark Pope's claim that fatigue is affecting team

Kentucky‘s regular season came to a whimpering end Saturday afternoon in Rupp Arena, as it fell to No. 5 Florida 84-77 in Lexington. With the loss, the Wildcats officially failed to reach the 20-win mark in the regular season for the first time since the 2007-08 season.

The season has been a rollercoaster for Kentucky, its players, its staff, and its fans. The Wildcats opened the season ranked No. 9 in the Preseason AP Poll, but quickly fell to the unranked ranks following a 9-6 start to the season. Kentucky then won eight of its next nine games to jump back into the AP Poll, but finished the regular season on the losing end of five of its final seven contests.

Head coach Mark Pope has continually blamed fatigue for the team’s struggles this season. Following the loss to the Gators, Pope said, “We make poor decisions when we’re tired… We’ll perform better than that.” Kentucky forward Andrija Jelavic was then asked if this truly was the problem. He pushed back on his head coach’s claim.

“No. It’s not. Like I said, everyone plays at the same pace that we do,” Jelavic said. “Everyone plays Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then they play on the weekend. I don’t know, but that’s not the problem.

“We are all 19-21 year old kids. We don’t have problems with playing a lot. If you can’t play two games in a week, you can’t play in the NBA. If you can’t do it here, you can’t do it at the next level.”

Mark Pope has blamed fatigue for Kentucky’s struggles this season

Due to Kentucky‘s injury problems this season, Pope has claimed that his nine rotational players are dealing with fatigue. He also blamed fatigue for the Wildcats’ 96-85 loss to Texas A&M on Tuesday, in which they took a 30-18 lead before being outscored 27-3 over the remainder of the first half.

“These Saturday/Tuesdays have been a little bit challenging for us with our limited, limited roster size right now,” Pope said. It’s concerning in the sense that — like, we’d like to be perfect. It’s not concerning in terms of my evaluation of our guys.

“We have terrific players that care so deeply about this. We fell victim to what Texas A&M likes to do. The way these guys delivered on what we were trying to do in the first 10, 12, 14 minutes of the game was spectacular, and then — whether it’s fatigue or emotional fatigue, or physical fatigue, or distraction, whatever, we just went away from that.”

With the loss, Kentucky will either be a No. 9 or No. 10 seed in next week’s SEC Tournament in Nashville. It will mark the first time in program history that the Wildcats will be playing on the Wednesday of the modern SEC Tournament.