Before the first media timeout in Tennessee basketball’s 79-73 win at Alabama, Tennessee shooting guard Bishop Boswell had already picked up two fouls. Playing for Rick Barnes, that typically means spending the remainder of the first half on the bench.
However, Barnes put his trust in Boswell. The sophomore guard checked back in with 9:13 to play in the first half and ended up playing 10 first half minutes.
“I don’t know. I just felt like he’s smart enough and he knows that we need him,” Barnes said of why he trusted Boswell. “I just felt like we needed to do it because based on what we had done last week, how much time we had spent trying to get some cohesiveness.”
In Tennessee’s previous two losses, the Vols had finished halves poorly while a key player sat with foul trouble. Florida took a double-digit lead after Boswell spent the final minutes of the first half on the bench with two fouls. Against Kentucky, the Wildcats’ began chipping into Tennessee’s lead as Ja’Kobi Gillespie sat with foul trouble.
Barnes remarked after the loss against Kentucky that he may have to change his strategy. He made the adjustment against Alabama and the move paid dividends.
Boswell made the opportunity count. He scored seven straight points for Tennessee in the first half from the 6:20 to 4:27 mark. He hit midrange jumpers on consecutive possessions before capping off the stretch with a three-pointer. Boswell helped keep Tennessee afloat while its offense sputtered in the first half.
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“I mean, you have to have confidence in him, and we thought he could do it,” Barnes said. “And those minutes were huge. He came in and he went for a stretch where, I think, he scored what five or seven points where those were, those were big minutes.”
“That was super important,” Gillespie said. “There was obviously something that made Rick change his mind and it was a good thing that he did. What, he scored seven points? That was really important because we weren’t clicking on offense at that point.”
Boswell didn’t just reward Barnes’ confidence in the short term but also in the long term. The shooting guard finished the game with four fouls but did not foul out. He played 14 minutes in the second half and was by far Tennessee’s most effective defender on star Alabama point guard Labaron Philon.
That defensive energy and his ability not to foul out was just as important as the offensive spark he provided.
“He’s such a tenacious defender,” freshman Nate Ament said. “I know I feed off his energy when he’s in the game with me, but he’s also just such a great leader. When I see him fighting his tail off, it makes me want to fight even harder for him because I know how much he goes through every day is practice. How hard he works. To see him kind of just do what he does every day, and even on the offensive end, him hitting a couple shots for us.”
Boswell finished the game with eight points, five rebounds, one steal and a team-best plus-15 on the court in the critical win.
