Lady Vols basketball went on the road and came up well short against UConn. Despite being tied at the half, Tennessee fell apart in the late third quarter and could never recover. The result was a 96-66 loss, the second-largest margin of defeat in program history.
After the game, Lady Vols head coach Kim Caldwell and forward Janiah Barker met with the media. They were asked about what went wrong, what the next step is, how the freshmen played and more.
Here’s what they said.
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HC Kim Caldwell
Opening statement
“That’s a really good team. And when you take plays off, they make you pay for every play off. A lot of what we did was self-inflicted, but then again, if you lose sight of your man for half of a second, they’re gonna capitalize on it. And that’s why they are doing what they’re doing right now.”
On what went wrong in the second part of the third quarter
“The same thing we always see. We take bad shots, we don’t share the ball, we don’t play within our offense, and they go score on the other end.”
On the team’s fight
“I wish we would’ve been more consistent with it. I think that there were some glimpses where I am very proud of my team, where we looked as good as we have looked all year, for about 15 minutes. Obviously, it’s a 40-minute game, so that’s not enough. But we do have some takeaways where we can show of this is what we need to continue to do going forward.”
On the upcoming schedule, the rescheduled Ole Miss game
“Yeah, it’s gonna be tough. We gotta do it one game at a time. I didn’t really love where this was at in our schedule, especially with that game being moved. But that’s what the SEC is. You play – I think we only have two unranked games left on our schedule. And so, you have to do it one game at a time. You can’t look big picture. You gotta do it scout-specific and chip away at it.”
On if part of the scout was to force turnovers
“Yeah, absolutely.”
On responding to early adversity after a bad start to the game, bad loss to Mississippi State on Thursday
“I thought we did a great job of not getting too high or too low when, I think, we were down 16 points in the first half. We did a really good job there. I wish we would’ve had a little more punch in the second half. But that’s maturity that I hadn’t seen. I hadn’t seen us take ourselves out of an eight-point hole. And we dug ourselves pretty quickly out of a 16-point hole. So hopefully now they have proof of concept, they see that it works, and that we can build on that if we get down again. We won’t just fold. We know we have a comeback in us. And again, the comeback wasn’t hard. It happened pretty quickly.”
On how the freshmen played in a big game compared to their last time on a big stage
“Yeah, I mean, I trusted them to be on the floor. I think we all made mistakes in this environment. I think our freshmen didn’t make as many as they would have in our opening game. We’ve played on really big stages this year, which has helped us for this. And we’re gonna continue to play on some more. And so again, they just gotta continue to grow in these. And if they can play here in this environment, then they can play anywhere in the country. Hopefully, that helps them gain that confidence when we go play South Carolina, and we go play on the road, we go play at LSU and we go do this to finish SEC play.”
On if she’d prefer to not play UConn in the middle of SEC play
“Absolutely. It’s just too tough for us and you get two bye weeks in the SEC, so this takes away one of our bye weeks, which is unfortunate.”
On what she wants her team to improve on in the next big game
“I think if they can keep their heads on, there is some film that we can watch that if we become obsessed with replicating it, we will be all right. And I hope that we’ll get there. I hope that they’ll figure that out and they’ll see that and will continue to do that and that they know that they have more in them and they know that we have a higher ceiling. And we know what our floor is. Our floor has come out. It came out last game, it came out in the second half of this game. We gotta get away from that and we gotta be cognizant of that is what we default to, that’s what we reset to of not sharing the ball, of taking plays off on the defensive end. And we just have to be self-aware. ‘Okay, let’s lock in. Let’s not do that. Let’s eliminate those mistakes.'”
F Janiah Barker
On erasing an early deficit, things slipping away in the second half
“I mean, I think Coach Kim said it really well, you know, you can’t make mistakes against a team like that, where they really capitalize on everything. They run their offense so well, so pure. If you miss a switch, they’re gonna score off of it. You know what I’m saying? So, I think we just kind of got like lackadaisical in that second half, and they just got away from us.”
One Response
Lot of whining.