Tennessee Basketball’s SEC Tournament run came to a close in the quarterfinal round on Friday with a 72-65 loss against in-state rival Vanderbilt from Nashville. The Vols will now head back to Knoxville and wait for Selection Sunday to find out their upcoming path through the NCAA Tournament.
Nate Ament logged just 12 points in his second game back from injury, which followed a 27-point outing against Auburn on Thursday afternoon in the tournament. The star freshman didn’t quite look like himself and struggled to make shots from the floor. Ament scored 10 points at the free throw line, but only made one of his 13 attempts from the floor.
Ament suffered an injury in Tennessee’s third-to-last regular season game against Alabama and then sat out of the Vols’ final two regular season games against South Carolina and Vanderbilt. He made his return for the SEC Tournament, and while he looked good on Thursday, Barnes said after the game that Tennessee held internal conversations about whether to let him continue playing in the conference tournament.
Barnes was asked about Ament’s health during his postgame press conference:
“Well, we talked about it last night,” Barnes said of Ament’s health. “Again, we even thought about maybe not playing him at all because, again, just as a precautionary for next week. But he said there’s no way I’m not going to play. When you don’t go for 10 days, I don’t care if it’s ankle, knee or anything, when you play as physical of a game as we did last night, you’re going to be a little sore in other areas, not just that area.”
Video Via SEC Communications
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Ament logged 30 minutes in the loss on Friday, which is right around his season average. He tallied 32 minutes during the Vols’ win over the Tigers on Thursday.
“Nate tried. He did everything,” Barnes said. “Obviously we’ve got to make some of those shots around the rim, got to make free throws. You can just take away the turnovers in the second half, you take away those, I don’t know how many they had in the first half, but in the second half I know they had six or eight. We can’t defend that. Bad decisions. We made too many tough decisions. Some of them you can’t do.”
Barnes said that there is a blessing in disguise that stems from the loss, though, which is getting his players rest before the NCAA Tournament begins next week.
“I always say sometimes there’s a blessing in disguise,” Barnes said of Ament after the game. “You always want to win, but if we’d have won today, played tomorrow and won, would we have played him tomorrow? I don’t even know. He’s not 100%. We know it. But in his mind it doesn’t matter, he wants to play. Maybe the loss today gives Ja’Kobi Gillespie a chance to get more rest. It will give Nate a chance to recover.
“It would have been difficult if he didn’t play at all in this tournament. To miss two and a half, three weeks in this season, it would have been hard. Even though he does everything he possibly can, there’s nothing like playing, especially this time of year. Again, we certainly want to win. If it gives him a chance to continue to get closer to 100%, which there’s not many guys really at 100% this time of year. There’s something going on.”
Tennessee will now await its seed for the NCAA Tournament, which will come out on Sunday afternoon. The Vols were a projected 5-seed in Joe Lunardi’s Friday morning update prior to the loss against Vanderbilt.
Stay tuned to Rocky Top Insider for more coverage of Tennessee’s March Madness path as information unfolds this weekend.
