Louisville dropped to 6-5 after a tough loss against their hated rival up the road. A loss is never the result that the Cardinals want, especially against that team, but they battled for 40 minutes straight while being short-handed.

The score ended up being 93-85, but the game felt a whole lot closer than that with Louisville chipping away at the lead every time UK wanted to break the game open. Down for what was basically the entire game but Pat Kelsey’s group wouldn’t go away and they had a few opportunities to take back control of the game.

I believe a healthy Louisville team would affect the outcome, but this is what we’re working with for the next couple of months so there’s no choice but to make it work, right?

1. Short-handed, but still dangerous?

Louisville essentially has a seven-man rotation for the time being until Aboubacar Traore comes back from a broken arm, but the flashes they’ve shown against Duke and UK are encouraging. The backcourt is still a pretty talented one with Chucky Hepburn and Terrence Edwards Jr, who’s starting to settle in more and more. Edwards was in attack mode the whole game against Kentucky and that same aggressive will help Louisville a lot if he can sustain it.

Pat Kelsey is a good enough coach to have this team compete with anyone, but if he wants to win some of these tough battles he’s going to need someone else to make consistent shots and my guess would be Noah Waterman. Normally a good three point shooter, Waterman is in a pretty bad slump right now and there’s really no other way to put it. He still didn’t shoot particularly “well” against UK, but he did the see ball go in a few times (3/9 3P) so maybe he can find his rhythm and build off that. If Waterman can score double figures, Louisville will have a chance to win games in the ACC. We’ll revisit this in a couple of weeks.

2. Might need more wrinkles to the defense.

With Kasean Pryor out for the remainder of the season, there’s going to be a few teams that Louisville will not be able to matchup with man-to-man in the ACC and it is what it is. I think an occasional zone or two will bode well for Pat Kelsey’s team, especially when opponents are just exploiting mismatches. I’m not saying it’s going to work every time, but you’d be surprised what an effective zone does to a team’s offense if they don’t have an answer for it.

Sometimes all you need is a new look to get your opponents out of rhythm and it has to be worth a shot if man continues to not always be the answer.

3. Free throw shooting is still an issue.

64% (9/14) is what the Cardinals shot from the line against UK and not only is that not good enough, but the misses they had were in critical moments like one-and-one situations in a single digit game. Misses in those moments will come back to bite Louisville in every tight game down the stretch. In some ways you could argue that the games comes down to stuff like that, but nonetheless it needs to be improved as I’ve been saying since the beginning of the season.

After a rough schedule of ranked opponents for Louisville, it’s finally time for ACC play outside of a home game against EKU December 28th. Their first matchup will be on the road against a solid Florida State team who’s 8-3 so far. The good thing for Louisville is that they’re about as battle tested as anyone in the country right now so that could be an advantage if they can clean up the things mentioned above. The Seminoles haven’t had to face the same caliber of teams that this group has so it’ll make or break the short-handed Cardinals.

This feels like a winnable game for Louisville that will be tight the whole time, but they’ll need to take care of business to get back on the right track.

Tip-off will be this Saturday in Tallahassee at 2:00 P.M. (ET).