In general, when playing a capable team I'd much rather not play them coming off a loss. Minny also had a terrible game before they played us at Iowa where Marcus Carr couldn't have thrown the ball in the ocean and then against us he's on-fire Kobe Bryant.
I especially don't like playing a Calipari team coming off a loss. Say what you want about him, he's a pretty good motivator, and when his team loses it just gives him extra fuel to use. Kind of smart of him to get his team acquainted with this venue that sounds like another shooting nightmare for us. Based on the unusual type of injury, I have no idea when we will get a 100% Washington back... but Holtmann's comments that he was nowhere close to ready for the Minny game weren't the most encouraging, at least not that he will be in top form whenever he does play his next game.
Holtmann commented that Minny and even SEMO sped them up on offense a bit and got them out of sync. Well, UK can do that type of thing twice as well as either of those teams, so we are really going to need our team locked in on both ends of the floor and we need to impose the pace of the game.