Tennessee basketball led by as many 17 points in the first half before falling to Kentucky 80-78 on Saturday afternoon in Knoxville. The Vols’ defense was abysmal in the second half while Tennessee had some critical turnovers late.
Following the matchup, Tennessee head coach Rick Barnes discussed late game turnovers, a terrible defensive showing and much more. Here’s everything Barnes said.
More From RTI: Three Quick Takeaways As Tennessee Basketball Collapses In Loss At Kentucky
On what went wrong for Tennessee defensively in the second half
“Poor ball-screen coverage with not getting into the ball. And we went to different coverages, even when we stayed in their sets and guarded their sets in the end, we didn’t do a good job finishing out the possession, by getting blown by, putting us in rotation, then allowing them to score. I thought (Denzel) Aberdeen was terrific in the second half. It didn’t matter who was guarding him, he got it where he wanted to go. And then getting in the rotation, it’s always hard to guard, it’s always hard to rebound. You start the game, you play our normal defense, they made some threes and you expect that. But just again, ball-screen coverage at the point of attack was really poor.”
On what went wrong on Tennessee’s turnover in the final minute that gave Kentucky the lead after scoring in transition
“Well, we we’re going to get it Nate (Ament) and give him the chance to rip it and drive it, but if that’s not there, there’s obviously another option to it. And the second half, you guys saw the obvious, you can’t throw the pick-6s (turnovers leading to transition points), especially late in the game. You can’t turn the ball over at any point in time. The last four minutes its double trouble when you do that. Then you foul on the and-one, that’s a big play, instead of being down (three), you could be done (two).
“But 49 points, again, I’m not going to say we gave them up, they scored 49 points. You got give them credit. I’m disappointed. Everybody’s disappointed. But you got to give Kentucky credit, Mark (Pope) kept his guys in there. It really started in the first half, at the end of the first half. We built a lead and should have gone into halftime with (a bigger lead). But with the group we’ve got right now, I’m not sure they think (the game is over). The game is never over. A 17-point lead in today’s world is nothing if you got a group of guys together and do what they need to do. We didn’t (stick together) in the second half. We gave up 49 points, got out rebounded.
“It’s just our inconsistency. And the way we ended the half is somewhat what happened down at Florida. There’s a breaking point at some point in time in the game. And you could just feel the way we closed the first half was not good.”
On how to get this Tennessee team to understand games are never over
“I think being brutally honest. We show it to them on tape. You just can’t turn the ball over situation. You can’t take bad shots. You got to be connected there. And it’s hard sometimes for players. There’s no doubt they want to win, but the other guys do too. And you have to be be together at the end of the game. You have to be. And we can talk about it, talk about it. But we we’re not in practice (during games) where we can stop it and talk about it. When the lights are on, you’d like to think for our preparation, our work, that we know what to do. But still guys get playing fast at a speed that and sometimes just we’re not aware of it. And it’s part of these guys still learning how to play basketball and understand it. By now we should know what goes into losing, I would tell you that. Because other than the Florida game, I can make a case that we just shot ourself in the foot so many times. And other coaches would say the same thing. I think every coach in the country, when they lose a game, when they know the talent is equal or something, (they think) we didn’t do this, we didn’t do that. And I feel like that. If we did what we need to do, we we could be a much better team right now. But we’re not doing it, so we are who we are.”
On Tennessee giving up 49 or more points in the second half of three SEC losses, how the Vols can finish better
“You know, some of that is experience. You have to understand that you got to play for 40 minutes to start with. Like I said, a lead in the first half is sometimes fool’s gold, whatever you want to call it. You got to play. I mean, every team we have played, and I’ve said it for my entire career, that other team wants to win too. They’re well-coached. And we know that in these type of situations before, but it gets back you got to play for 40 minutes. And the things that we did in the first half, the question is why didn’t we do it? I don’t know why. I don’t. You think about it, two guys in the first half had just four or five shots. At the end of the game, we were guarding their sets, they were just putting their heads down, driving the ball and putting us in rotation that allows them to get some offensive rebounds, too. We guard the ball well enough. We didn’t defend well enough to win the game.”
On Tennessee freshman Nate Ament needing to be more aggressive for 40 minutes
“Nate is figuring it out more and more. My question is why didn’t he get the ball more when he needs it? That’s the question I would say. And Nate’s doing fine, he’s getting better. He is running a lot. You can tell he is getting more comfortable. I look at him today, he got seven shots. But you look at our post guys, I mean some of those that (Jaylen) Carey missed, I’d rather Nate shoot. He’s going up against three or four guys. And we told (Carey) you’ve got to kick it out some, you got to adjust. When teams are burying you in there, they’re not going to just keep doing that. First part of the game he was getting it there and then you got to kick out and make them decide they going to stay in there or are they’re going to cover the 3-point line. But Nate needs more than seven shots. He does. And we’ll get that. But Nate’s just getting so much better. He really is. And he had 17 today, made his free throws. But he needs more than seven shots. And some of it, he’s going to have to go get it and make that happen.”
On adjusting to not having veteran players with experience in the program has been tougher than expected
“No doubt. I mean no doubt. Those guys win these games because they (are) not going to collapse on defense like that. And that’s what it was, it was a real collapse defensively. Those guys weren’t nearly as talented as these guys are offensively. But they would at the end of the game I think your defense still wins and taking care of the ball. You do those two things and rebound the way we normally rebound. We’ve got a chance. I told these guys, we won a lot of games here, teams that are just competitive, tough, hard-nosed defensive teams. Rebounding. But they’ve got to take personally to get stops and I mean we’re tonight you don’t ever want to use the word hiding guys, but you’re really trying to hide some guys for some reasons and you it’s hard to win with that. And then the way we ended the first half you always go back and second-guess some things.
“But some of the plays we made with some of those guys there and they’re young, but to answer your question— we knew we’d go through some of this growing pains because some of these guys have never been at this level of competition, and know what it’s about. And that’s a great question about do you want to build your program with high school players and supplement them with the transfer portal, or do you want to go the other way? And we have chosen, like we are really excited about our freshman class. We really are. We think these guys are a lot like those teams we’ve had here in the past. But with that said, we expected guys that we got out of the portal to give us more here and what we expected from them was consistency. And we haven’t got that and not just from them and we need JP to be the player we know he can be Felix. We need him to get 10 rebounds a night for us because when he does we’re really good. We’re really good and so is it a mindset? In some ways, yes it is. But we got a long way to go. A year ago I think we were 4-4 and after I think being the No. 1 team in the country. And we kept getting better. That’s what we gotta do with this group.”
On where, why they’re falling short defensively
“Well our help defense, we’ve got more discipline defensively and even when we made the adjustments that we needed to make, say in the A&M game, we had to spread out. We’ve learned from that and we got better. But you can’t win at this level, at the highest level, if you can’t somewhat be good at point of contact, you know combat in the ball screen. If that guard doesn’t get into the ball, if it puts so much pressure on that big guy and you got teams that can shoot, do you gap it? Do you stay out? I think you can do it all. If those guards do their deal. If they don’t it is a problem and do we get the message? All I can tell you is we’ve done it great more than we’ve done it poorly. So they know that. But it’s a matter of consistency in doing it at the level to win these type games. Day in, day out. It is hard. Believe me, it’s hard to get up there and a guy like Gillespie who is going get hit a bunch during the game and then we expect him to do a lot on the offensive end. We want him to slow down on the offense and not wear himself out there. And as much as he does. Sometimes he gets going and he needs to slow that part down because on the defensive end, I know he’s trying to do it and if he’s tired, that’s my fault. We tried to get him out. I thought it was a blessing in disguise in the first half they got in foul trouble and he had to sit as long as he has probably sat all year. But the young guys, yeah, you expect him to take a little bit longer but we’re talking most of the time tonight it was older guys up there in that ball screen. Guys that played enough minutes to know that we need to get this done.”
On why it’s taken so long to find consistency even with players who have played major minutes
“You know what, we should probably kick that to ESPN guys in the studio. Let them answer because I don’t know. Maybe they have the answer. They seem to have answers with it. I wish I knew. You know how to get that and our guys work hard. They do work hard but there’s more to it, the mental side of it just as important and understanding that it is a high-level competitive but the thing that we’re not consistent with, they have to be there.
That’s just, hands, the details and we’re just not where we need to be for 40 minutes. We’ve proven we can play with some of the best teams in the country, but do I think we should be getting more out of our four front line guys? Absolutely. I don’t know why we’re not. I know we watch it, we watch it, we watch it, we go back with it to them, but when the lights come on they’ve gotta do it and we just haven’t been able to be consistent with the effort that we need from them. Whether it’s what we want to do posting up. The angles, decision making, all that. But that’s why it’s a long way to go and our job is to keep working and it’s our job to get them better. We’re going to keep working until we do.”
On the reason Jaylen Carey started over DeWayne Brown II
“The reason we started (Carey) was I didn’t think DeWayne — our two hardest working post players are Felix (Okpara) and DeWayne. Those guys, they had all summer. They didn’t take one rep off. You know, Jaylen missed some time with some injuries. J.P. (Estrella) obviously coming back from the injury. Cade (Phillips) was here at the time, but playing through (a shoulder injury). But those guys have logged more minutes by far than the other post guys, and the reason we chose not to start DeWayne was maybe to relieve a little bit of pressure, and let him see it coming off the bench. The hardest part is, I know starting is important to guys even though I’ve never put a lot into it. So when you do put somebody in the lineup, you are wanting to give it to somebody who’s really earned it and in this situation, I don’t even think anybody earned it other than we were trying to help DeWayne with it. I could say today, well maybe we should have thought about going the other way, with maybe Nate at the four and a guard there. I can talk about some of our guards, too, the consistency part of it, but the reason that we didn’t start him was simply I thought it might help DeWayne to see and it just so happened that we just decided as a staff we’d give Jaylen a shot at it and go from there.”
On if Tennessee’s lack of additional ball handlers leading to Ja’Kobi Gillespie being fatigued at the end of games, is causing Gillespie to turn the basketball over in crunch time:
“He can’t throw the ball away. I mean, I think we trust our guys. Now, you go back to the Florida game, I think their whole game plan was to make — as you’re saying — somebody else make those decisions, play with it. We work with those guys trying to understand, if they got the ball, things break down, we’re not organized, let’s get organized. It’s just get organized and be efficient. There’s guys that can do that, but our turnovers — one in front of our (bench), you can’t just flip the ball out, you can’t throw the ball away. And again, part of our scouting report was, their best defense is running through passing lanes. The one that Bishop (Boswell) threw, that was the second thing on the board, their best defense is them running through passing lanes.
“So we talked about — we even went back and looked at all our turnovers and said, ‘what can we do to help ’em?’ And I can only tell you what I told them, we can’t because the passes you’re throwing, we can’t pull those passes back. We can’t. It’s the decision when you’re trying, like, I can think of one night when J.P. had the ball there and he tried to feed the post. I mean, you can’t, you just can’t make those passes. The pick-sixes, you can’t make ’em, especially when it’s a part of the scouting report.”
On if he’ll consider playing guys with two fouls late in the first half of games after foul trouble hurt them at Florida and against Kentucky
“Well, if it continues like this, probably. Ja’Kobi, if he’s tired — again, I thought we — looking back — we thought, maybe we’re playing him too many minutes ’cause it numbers are down from a year ago, but you think about it, he did, really, a pretty — now, defensively today, he struggled in the second half. That’s fatigue. Maybe it is. Maybe this week will be good for him because he’s logged a lot of minutes and you take away, I think he had three turnovers in the last four minutes, otherwise you look at his score this game, that’s a darn good game. But those three at the end are brutal and maybe it’s fatigue. If it is, that’s my fault. But all that, again, we gotta fix it. I mean our turnovers, we ended up with how many? 12. That’s a lot better than 20 and 19. Still, those three at the end were critical. Those pick-sixes are all critical because you can’t defend that.”
On what he makes of Tennessee giving up 13 offensive rebounds to Kentucky in the second half after he constructed the roster to be a good rebounding team
“Effort, or lack of, and doing your job. I mean, everybody’s got a job and like most teams, you got some guys, they put their stock in thinking it’s all about scoring a bucket, trying to do that. Everybody’s got a job to do. You gotta do your job. Like, I really believe if Felix gets 10 rebounds a game, he’s going to stumble into 12 points. I believe that, you know? And I can say that about our other post guys, the same thing.
“But again, just rebounding. I mean, that’s what we talk about. You’re asking me when we break it down, we look at it, when we are really rebounding well, it’s just great effort and when you’re not, it’s not. Almost every time, it’s one-on-one combat when that shot goes up. Who’s gonna go get it and who’s not? And sometimes there’s some long ones that bounce a different way. We just gave up 49 points in the second half. I’m not gonna say we gave it up, they went and got it, and give them credit. But we’re disappointed because again, you said it, we were built that we’re gonna rebound.
“So if you ask me point blank, I know when I look at the tape — I don’t have to look at the tape. I hate to feel like I’m throwing guys under the bus and I’m not throwing any one particular guy under the bus, but when you get out-rebounded, it is lack of effort. Plain and simple. And I would say that of any team I’ve ever coached, not just this team.”
