LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB+WAVE) — For 20 minutes Monday night, Louisville played basketball like it was waiting seven months to start.
For the next 20 years, he played like he maybe needed another week of practice.
Welcome to the 2026-27 season.
Pat Kelsey’s Cardinals opened with an 84-70 victory over Chattanooga at the KFC Yum! Center, a game that started as a demonstration of everything Louisville could do and ended with a rather long list of things it still needs to work on.
There was something to love. There was something to clean up. And there was enough of a difference between the two halves to make one wonder if the teams had changed uniforms at halftime.
Louisville scored 56 points in the first half. He made 28 in the second. The Cardinals made eight three-pointers before halftime and one afterward. They shot 57.7 percent in the first 20 minutes and 29 percent in the final 20.
And they missed 11 free throws in the game, including nine after halftime.
A team that seemed capable of scoring whenever it wanted could no longer buy a basket, even if it was free.
The final score has never been seriously in doubt. But the ending was not as beautiful as the beginning.
And what a start.
Louisville was relentless defensively, attacking the passing lanes, creating turnovers and turning Chattanooga’s mistakes into dunks and layups on the other end. The Cardinals moved the ball, ran the field and showed the kind of offensive versatility that makes this team so intriguing.
What was remarkable was that Chattanooga didn’t play badly.
The Mocs made seven three-pointers in the first half, shot 47 percent from beyond the arc and scored 35 points. Against many opponents, this would have been enough to stay within striking distance.
Against Louisville, that left them trailing by 21.
Kelsey said the first half was exactly what he wanted.
“The first half was really, really good from both sides,” he said.
The Cardinals led 56-35 at halftime and pushed their margin to 25 early in the second half.
Then someone apparently misplaced the offense.
Louisville missed its first 12 three-point attempts of the second half. Flory Bidunga committed his fourth foul more than 10 minutes from time. Seth Trimble has run into some bad trouble himself.
And the Cardinals began missing free throws with almost the same enthusiasm they had shown while making baskets earlier.
Chattanooga continued to play. The Mocs cut what was a 20-point deficit to 15 with 3:46 to play, and although Louisville never faced serious risk of losing, the game had long since stopped resembling the first-half showcase.
The Cardinals shot just 1 of 16 from three-point range after halftime and made just 9 of 18 free throws.
But it’s not these numbers that bother Kelsey the most.
This is what happened after the shots stopped falling.
Kelsey said he turned to assistant Sean Dixon during the drought in the second half and marveled at how many open looks Louisville was missing.
“We get some wide-open looks, but they just don’t go in,” he recalled telling Dixon.
This is what he could live with.
What followed was another matter.
“You do what you hope your team never does,” Kelsey said. “They… start to feel a little bit sorry for themselves and get frustrated because the ball isn’t going in.”
And suddenly the problems spread.
Chattanooga had only one offensive rebound in the first half. The Mocs grabbed 10 in the second.
Louisville, which had spent the first 20 minutes attacking everything in sight, began to stand and watch.
The Cardinals didn’t stop shooting. They had stopped doing certain things that didn’t require shooting.
“Sometimes the basketball gods just aren’t on your side when it comes to the ball,” Kelsey said. “But you can still defend and rebound, and that’s what disappoints me the most.”
Louisville has enough offensive talent to survive an occasional cold spell. What she can’t afford is to let a cold snap become an excuse for everything else.
And Kelsey wasn’t interested in celebrating a comfortable opening night win by overlooking that.
“I’m not going to come here and sugarcoat things,” he said. “And hey, a win is a win. We won by 14, no matter what. I just can’t do that.”
He wasn’t finished.
“I’m a little disappointed, a little upset and I can’t wait to get back to work.”
Free throws deserve their own mention.
Louisville finished 15 of 26 from the line, a 57.7 percent performance that will need to be significantly improved before the competition gets tougher.
The Cardinals showed in their first three appearances, including two exhibitions, that they had enough offensive weapons to win without relying entirely on three-point shooting.
But missing nearly half of their free throws is a habit they can’t afford to develop. There will be games where these points will matter much more than on Monday.
There were individual points of light.
Bidunga led Louisville with 16 points, nine rebounds and three steals. Adrian Wooley scored 15 points and added four steals, displaying the aggression Kelsey demanded of him.
Wooley scored Louisville’s first basket after grabbing an offensive rebound, and he continued to attack the basket throughout the first half.
“Adrian is great when he leans forward, plays downhill and plays offense,” Kelsey said. “And you saw that today.”
Jackson Shelstad and Trimble scored 13 points each, with Trimble adding five assists. Shelstad had seven rebounds.
Karter Knox finished with nine points and a team-high 11 rebounds. Kelsey praised Knox for continuing to attack the glass even as the team’s rebounding effort waned around him.
“It’s a big, strong, physical freight train that attacks the rim, and it really crushes the glass,” Kelsey said.
Louisville also entered its opener with an unexpected personnel issue.
The school announced before the announcement that guard De’Shayne Montgomery would miss four to six weeks with a foot injury, removing another piece of Kelsey’s rotation before the season even started.
That meant a bigger role for freshman Isaac Ellis, who played 14 minutes in his varsity debut.
Ellis finished with a point and an assist, missing both of his three-point attempts and making one of four free throws. But Kelsey loved his willingness to mix things up.
“Isaac is a tough, uncompromising guy,” Kelsey said. “He’s seen some loose balls out there, and he eats them, gets his teeth into them, plays hard.”
Kelsey added: “We’re going to need him this year.”
Montgomery’s absence comes with the fact that 7-foot-5 center Gabe Dynes is already sidelined following shoulder surgery, leaving Kelsey with less depth than he anticipated at the start of the season.
But Monday’s opener was not a discouraging performance.
For one half, Louisville looked like it could beat a good opponent even when that opponent was making shots. The Cardinals’ defensive pressure, transition attack and ability to score in different ways was impressive.
The second half was much less so.
Kelsey didn’t want to pretend otherwise.
“We have a chance to be really good,” he said. “We have a chance to be special.”
That’s why the second half bothered him. Not because the Cardinals missed shots, but because they let missed shots dictate how they played. They started playing the score, Kelsey said. They let their frustration show.
“You can see it in the guys’ faces,” he said. “It can’t be like that. It can’t be like that if you want to be an elite team.”
Louisville showed enough in the first half to raise expectations. That showed enough in the second to keep Kelsey busy.
But Kelsey doesn’t question her team’s willingness to work. He said his leadership was exceptional, his best players were his hardest workers and he hardly needed to say anything in the locker room afterward.
“They know it,” he said.
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