Lady Vols basketball is off to a 3-1 start with the lone loss coming on a neutral floor to a top-10 NC State team. However, it hasn’t been the prettiest stretch of games. One of the lingering issues throughout the opening quartet has been poor shot selection. Tennessee has settled for far too many threes or contested shots instead of getting downhill or finding better opportunities.
Lady Vols head coach Kim Caldwell is very aware of this issue. As a result, she’s used the week off before the trip to play MTSU on Thursday to hammer in better choices with the ball. What she’s relied on is making players verbalize in film study if a decision to shoot was good or bad.
What she’s found is that her team knows the difference between good and bad offensive choices. Now, she wants them to recognize it while they’re on the floor, too.
“It takes a lot of time to figure it out and you have to do a lot of film of where they’re taking accountability,” Caldwell said on Tuesday. “Was this a good shot or was this a bad shot? Was this good offense or was this bad offense? And that’s what we did from our last game. They all had to say no, this was bad. No, this was good. No, this was bad. Okay. So you know the difference. So why are we going on the floor and we’re continuing to run bad offense? You see what it is. You know what it is. So let’s make a change in real time.”
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The next step is to get it to translate to a game. The upcoming matchup with MTSU will need to see some growth, particularly in the half-court offense.
Too often early in the season, it’s been a lot of looking around and not a lot of moving. When players do decide to move off-ball, it’s been disconnected and out of sync far too often.
Part of what Caldwell thinks will solve the half-court offense woes is simply making shots. She said during the off-season that someone is going to have to step up as a shooter and that that is the biggest hole on the roster. So far, nobody has been able to be that consistent threat that Tennessee lost in Samara Spencer and Jewel Spear.
“It’s trending up, but there are some times where it still kinda looks where we’re not making the right read out,” Caldwell said on the half-court offense. “Then, again, we cut our offense up after our last game, and we had a lot of wide-open threes we didn’t hit. And so just, like, if we hit a couple of those, then our offense doesn’t look as bad. So continuing to shoot the ball with confidence, making the right play, not trying to drive on top of two people, communicating, being on the same page. There are times where we just look like five people on the floor, but maybe two people are communicating. But having all five players be in sync.”
The Lady Vols matchup with MTSU is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. ET. The game will air on ESPN+.
