On Thursday, No. 17 Lady Vols basketball will host a big-time SEC showdown with No. 11 Kentucky coming to town. Ahead of the game, Tennessee head coach Kim Caldwell met with the media to give her thoughts.
Caldwell was asked about Janiah Barker’s status, last year’s game against Kentucky, where the team is at and more.
Here is what she said.
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On the injury status of Janiah Barker
“I will get an update later this afternoon and then it’ll be on the injury report.”
On how much she looks at last year’s loss to Kentucky vs. this year’s tape
“You do some. You look at all of it.”
On what went wrong last year at Kentucky
“Yeah. I think our shot selection was really bad. The game in general was kind of an outlier game for us. We just were at that point in the season where we weren’t playing well and it kinda looked how the beginning of this year looked, to be honest, where we were one pass, jack, one pass, jack. We were not sharing the ball. We were taking bad shots and we weren’t getting stops. And then, it kind of just fell apart.”
On Kentucky’s Clara Strack
“She definitely has a bigger role. She’s doing more. She’s playing with more confidence. She’s shooting more and getting more looks at the rim. She’s carrying them. So, she’s a big key of what we’re trying to prep for.”
On having a ranked game at Alabama to prepare for Kentucky
“They’re two really good matchups back-to-back ’cause you have to go to the three-point line. And we did a terrible job guarding the three-point line in the last game. And so, if we could show some film of saying, ‘This can’t happen in our next game. This can’t happen in our next game.’ And so they pair really well together.”
On the challenge of playing Kentucky
“They are a really deep team, one through five, and they have two great players and they’re surrounded by phenomenal three-point shooters. And so, you have to keep them in front of you. You have to be able to guard them. They can go in transition. They can beat you in the half-court. They’re good defensively. They’re good at protecting the rim. They’re a top team in the country for a reason.”
On struggles guarding the three-point line
“Part of it was just taking plays off, not being aware, not being out there. I think Kentucky will shoot it better and I think they’ll shoot more contested ones, so really making sure that we put pressure on the three-point line. And you got to keep the ball in front of you ’cause once you have to scramble, you’re toast against them. And Tonie Morgan is, what, number two in the country in assists? And you got to keep her in front of you or she’s gonna score or she’s gonna give it to somebody else who- who is gonna score.”
On Mia Pauldo sitting with fouls then making an impact at Alabama
“It was big for her. I think she went in there and she made us a little bit nervous ’cause she baited into an offensive foul. And we’re like, ‘What are you doing?’ And so, you’ll still have some freshman moments, but as a coach, I’ll take that. I’ll take somebody who’s willing to make big plays. I’ll trust somebody who has that fire in them, as opposed to trying to pull it out and pull it out. We don’t ever have to pull it out to get it with her. She’s never scared of a moment. She’s gonna make the right play. She was good in practice yesterday. And so, I’m just proud of her and can’t wait to watch what she continues to do.”
On offensive spacing
“I think sharing the ball is the most important thing. Again, from our tape last year, we didn’t share it at all. It was bad and we hopefully have learned that lesson. And they’re gonna do a really good job of being in our gaps and trying to get us to take quick, bad ones. And we have to share. We have to trust everyone. We got to play inside out. We got to make them work.”
On where the press is right now
“I don’t like where our press is at all. I think that we’ve really been offensively focused for a long time. And so, we have to fix our press. We have to get more out of it. It’s gonna be tough to do it against Kentucky, but there will be some games in our schedule where we have time and space to fix it.”
On Nya Robertson on the sideline
“What impresses me as a coach, she’s kind of had a couple, a little stretch here of bad games. We met yesterday and just kind of tried to tell her, ‘This is not who you’re gonna be for the rest of the year. This is just a slump.’ And talking to her, I continue to talk to her about shot selection. But what impresses me is she can take the coaching and she never pouts. And so, if she gets benched for a while or doesn’t go back in or makes a couple mistakes, she’s still up there at the front of the bench. Doesn’t go sit at the end of the bench and sulks. And she’s still the first one up. She’s still cheering. She’s still having fun. She’s still encouraging her teammates. And for somebody who’s been the best player on her team for her entire career, for her to come here and not take it personally and not get in her head, just tells you what type of character she has.”
On how much the out-of-conference schedule helped at Alabama
“I think it helps everything. I think it’s why we look better, is because we figured it out playing against some teams. Had we not played tough teams, we wouldn’t be figuring it out now and we’d still look bad.”
On if she likes where the transition scoring is
“I do. You look at that and it’s easy to categorize that as offense. I haven’t really looked at how many points we were scoring. We are scoring off of them more. I think we’re getting eight and a half steals a game. I want that to be 10 or 11. I think it needs to be 10 or 11. And the way we are turning the ball over, I think it probably should be 13 or 14. So we just have to trust each other. We all have to do it and we got to be ready to go.”
On Kentucky’s Clara Strack
“She’s a tough matchup. She plays incredibly hard. She’s another one that is a weapon from everywhere on the floor. She could shoot it in the middle of the floor, she can get to the rim, she can drive it, she can pick and pop, she can shoot those threes, she can block shots, she can guard. So she really does it all. And hats off to her. In the games where she hasn’t played well, she still doesn’t blink, she still just plays hard. And I think that that’s a testament to, again, what type of player she is, her caliber, and then it’s gonna be a team effort on her.”
On why Nya Robertson sits at the front of the bench
“I think she does better when she’s up there. She can listen, she can learn, she can stay locked in. And, again, I think that she wants to be engaged and she wants to be kind of the hype man, having fun, giving people the first high five, and I think that’s important.”
On how they’ll replace Janiah Barker if she can’t play
“Yeah, I think it would be, if that’s the situation, I think it will be the same kind of scenario that we would be in when Coop didn’t play, that you can’t ask for it from one person. Everyone’s gonna have to kind of raise the bar.”
On how they can start fast after a slow start at Alabama
“I don’t think we’ve had a consistent problem all year being a fast-starting team. So I was proud of us being able to kind of get it back and not melt and not blink and not really worry about it. When you have a week off and they played, I think three games that week, and so when you had a week off, we were bound to start a little bit slow and it was the recovery I was impressed with. And hopefully that doesn’t happen again.”
On finishing offensively in games
“I think it’s growth. At any time you can get film and momentum and teaching points on the road against a ranked opponent, it helps you moving forward. And then it just helps build confidence on both sides of the ball.”
On Mia Pauldo’s uptick in offensive production
“I think overall our team is sharing the ball better so she’s getting more touches and I honestly think she could shoot more. We would like her to shoot more. We’d like her to get more looks. And she turns some down. She turns a lot down really to create for her team. She doesn’t take bad ones and we want her to take more. We need her to take more. She really spaces our offense out. And so I think it just took time for everyone to get on the same page and I think we’re starting to see that. And it’s not going to be perfect every single night, but I think she is really benefiting from that because she’s getting the ball back. She used to make the first pass and never touch it again.”
On the team’s resilience
“I think it’s going to be important every single game we have going forward and it was nonexistent for the first month, two months. And so I’m proud of them that we finally got there and now we just have to keep it. We have to keep it on the road. We have to keep it at home. We have to keep it down 20, up 20. We just have to keep it.”
On Deniya Prawl playing in a tight game as a freshman
“I thought she was playing with more confidence. Her and I also met yesterday about just continuing to play with confidence, continue to play hard and fly around, and she rebounded the ball well. She has a big body for us. She can guard. And I think again, I didn’t notice it at the time, I didn’t think about it at the time until I think maybe one of you guys asked that we had three freshmen on the court. And I wasn’t worried about them. I wasn’t worried about them for one second. And so the trust is built and so I think that she should just continue to build off that.”
