KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee fell 86-70 to Xavier in an exhibition Thursday night at Food City Center. The Vols led 35-27 at the half, but Xavier outscored them 59-35 after the break. The Musketeers shot 70% in the second half, went 8 of 14 from three and outrebounded Tennessee 24-10 over the final 20 minutes.
Tennessee shot 38.6% from the field and just 4 of 26 (15.4%) from three. Xavier won the rebounding battle 45-31 and finished with 17 second-chance points. Terrence Hill Jr. led the Vols with 22 points, Juke Harris added 15 and Jalen Haralson had 10. DeWayne Brown II grabbed a game-high 10 rebounds. Here is everything Rick Barnes said after the game.
Did Barnes expect a night like this?
“I did. I told the coaches, because I think these guys have heard so much about how good of offensive players they are and scoring production and all that. But we’ve been telling them all summer, there’s gonna be nights when you… tonight what did we score? What 70 points? We did that last year with guys that weren’t offensively productive. But the fact is, nights when you don’t shoot the ball, if you’re a good basketball team, you’re gonna find a way to win the game defensively. And once we hit a little bit of adversity, where they scored on us, all because of bad offense, it really got even worse because of really, really poor defense.
“And some of this, I’ll be honest with you, you couldn’t dream. You don’t let somebody ever run by you to get a layup, all those kind of things. But it’s good. I told the guys, maybe now you’ll realize what we’ve been harping on since you guys have been here. We’re gonna have to learn to guard at a high rate. First half, we thought we’d be a little jittery, which we were. DeWayne missed some shots at the rim that I think he’ll make, free throws.
“And we really could have got out and maybe changed our psyche a little bit, but that might have been a little bit of a false confidence or whatever, because I like the way it played out when they came back and got in the game. When they came back, I think an 11, 12-0 run, we didn’t respond well. We thought we were going to outscore them. Took too many bad shots. They got too much stuff at the rim, and then we came out of timeouts, talked about things we weren’t gonna give up, and we gave them up. Got to listen better. But now maybe they realize that, hey, we’re not gonna score our way to wins.
“And Xavier, Richard does a great job with his team, and he was good for us. I told the coaches, if we’re going to get beat, I hope they really beat us. So maybe we can really get their attention.”
Did the extent of the defensive issues surprise Barnes?
“Yeah, the bad habits. Guys are switching to switch because it’s too hard to fight through and do the things that we talk about. Even on offense, too much one on one stuff, guys just coming off looking to shoot the ball and shoot yourself into a bad night. Like I told them, go look at some numbers. Some guys have some good numbers, but we were a bad basketball team tonight, and when you have a bad basketball team, somebody’s gonna score some points.
“So you look at the point total, that’s not what’s indicative of how you impacted the game. We just had no fight at all when they got back in the game, and we weren’t making shots, we just didn’t guard. Just simply didn’t. The baskets we gave up, I think anybody’s gonna make those baskets.”
How do so many former primary scorers figure out what a good shot is while still playing with confidence?
“We’ve talked enough about that. Even offensively, I could talk about shot selection, but when you don’t have any fight in you to want to defend somebody and rebound, you’re not gonna win. And that’s the thing. We knew coming in tonight that we’re gonna have to rebound. I like the fact they had some size, and we knew they were going to get after it on the glass with their guards.
“See how many rebounds our guards had tonight? I said, where’s the rebounds here? DeWayne had 10. Miles Rubin had one. He’s got to do more than that. Juke Harris had two. No offensive rebounds. Dai Dai had two. Terrence Hill had two. Jalen Haralson had eight, but he played inside some with our guards. We’ve got to do a better job. Miles came out early. I thought physically early he wasn’t ready for it. But we’ve got to rebound as a group, and we didn’t do that. We’ve got to just annihilated on the glass.
“And free throw blockouts, which we work on every day, can’t happen. Until guys understand what goes into winning… First of all, the good thing about tonight is, once we break this film down with them, they will now know what goes into losing. And sometimes you’ve got to figure out what goes into losing before you can figure out what goes into winning. So many mistakes that we made tonight. Some of them forced, some of them unforced. But again, the attitude when it got to be a close game wasn’t good, wasn’t good at all.”
How much of the defensive breakdowns can be attributed to having 13 new players?
“Switching for no reason. How many times did we switch out just to put a guard on a post? They were slipping every screen. All we had to do was try to guard the basketball. We didn’t guard the ball. We were looking over our shoulder. We didn’t guard it.
“And I think another thing, this team better realize we didn’t have a real extensive scouting report because we didn’t want to do that. We wanted to see if our guys could do some things on the fly. And obviously, after tonight, they need a scouting report. I thought some guys let their offense dictate their effort mentally on the defensive side. We just did some uncharacteristic things that we’ve talked about for too long.
“I don’t care if these guys have ever played together or what. Just too many breakdowns, too many breakdowns offensively, not listening coming out of timeouts. There’s a lot of it. You expect some of it the first time out because of being jittery early, but as it went on, we just made so many careless mistakes. But again Xavier’s a good basketball team. They’re a really good basketball team, and they put it to us.”
What is his biggest focus leading up to the Duke game?
“I want to be able to guard somebody. I want to have a different mindset. We’ve talked about it, talked about it, talked about it, but maybe now these guys, they talk about this is what they do in terms of scoring. They didn’t do it tonight. And look what happened. There’s going to be games like that. I talk about it every year.
“When you want to be an NCAA Tournament team, it’s single elimination. If you don’t shoot the ball well, you better find a way to win. We’ve done that many, many times here with our defense, and maybe this will be what wakes these guys up and makes them understand we’re gonna have to learn to guard somebody.”
Beyond the rebounds, what stood out about Jalen Haralson’s performance?
“I just thought too many guys stopped playing defensively, trying to go for steals. He had a great steal, then he comes down, goes for a steal, which we don’t do that there, and they go down and hit a three. Those are momentum changers. Just undisciplined. And that goes back to coaching, it goes back to all that. We’ve just got to continue to coach them up. Hopefully this is what’s going to wake them up, because we’ve talked about it long enough, and now we’ll see.”
Was Barnes surprised the team couldn’t counterpunch when Xavier made its run?
“I didn’t know. I’ve never been in a game like that with these guys like this. That’s what you’re hoping to see. I’m disappointed that we didn’t, but we went about it the wrong way. At some point in time, I think we had nine offensive rebounds. They had 13. And when they were getting back in it, they got a lot of easy baskets. That’s ridiculous. They had 18 points off turnovers. They outscored us in the paint. Second chance points, 17.
“We could have maybe changed our mindset, but even if we would have been perfect in the first half and had a 10, 12 point lead, we’re gonna be in games where what happened tonight is gonna happen. I’d rather get exposed right now than in a week, two weeks. Because we did not respond to adversity at all. You ask me, I can’t tell you that I would know, because I’ve never been in that situation with them.”
Is Barnes concerned about his team’s size after seeing it against a bigger opponent?
“We are. But still, there’s different ways to play. When it gets down to competing for rebounds and playing on defense, I’ve seen five guards guard guys. It’s a mindset that we’ve got to develop to want to guard somebody.”
Is it disappointing to have to coach mindset and fight?
“I don’t know about that, because these guys were coming into a new system and trying to figure out some things. But we’ve talked about it long enough. That’s the disappointing thing. All the things that happened tonight, we’ve talked about what goes into winning: playing defense, rebounding the basketball, taking care of the ball. Those three things. And we just didn’t guard at all. Just too many easy baskets. And they didn’t do anything, really, that we hadn’t talked about.
“It’s just guys not being on edge away from the ball. Somewhat in la la land. Something’s coming, believe me. Too many guys are standing around, then thinking, well, I’m gonna go make a great play, and try to switch out, and they slip it, and there’s no communication. I don’t like the fact that guys were just switching out of convenience, because to me, that was a lack of toughness, fighting through.
“We were kind of making a little bit of a push to get a little momentum, and then we don’t chase the shooter, their best shooter. We just let them, and you try to go through, and they screened them and couldn’t get there. Finding even tonight how guys need very little room to get shots off. But the rebounding really disappoints me. It really does.”
