How to sum up Barnes’ bunch?
There is one word that perfectly describes the current University of Tennessee men’s basketball team.
No, it’s not orange, although orange fits as a description. Just not the one I’m looking for.
And no, it’s not the slew of nasty words the anti-Orange among us had pop into their UT-hatin’ heads.
This Tennessee basketball team is hard.
These Volunteers are hard to score against. They are hard to keep off the boards. They are, at times, hard to watch offensively. They have taken on the demeanor of head coach Rick Barnes, who is hard in that old-school, Southern preacher who was always super strict with his own youngins kind of way.
They were hard on my betting line Wednesday night and hard on newly minted No. 1 Alabama in a physical 68-59 win over the Crimson Tide in Knoxville. The Vols also will be hard to figure a month from now, for fans, foes and the folks who seed the hardcharging March Madness participants.
Wednesday night, the Vols — without two starters, mind you — did what next to no one has been able to this season, and that’s slow down the Alabama shooters.
It was a defensive clinic. Every shot challenged. Every pass contested. Every rebound viewed as much of a Tennessee treasure as the Opry and Dolly Parton.
Alabama missed 31 shots but got just eight offensive rebounds. Alabama had 11 assists (four fewer than its team average) and turned the ball over 19 times (five more than its average). Those numbers paint a hard picture, but so do these Vols.
Hard, that is, as in hard to figure, because after back-to-back losses to Vanderbilt and Missouri on buzzer-beating 3-pointers that followed an extremely ugly three-point win over Auburn, they were fading closer to the 5 line than the 2 line.
Moments like those make everyone realize the Vols are at times so offensively constipated that any tournament — the Southeastern Conference or the NCAA — could be a oneand-done proposition. But moments like Wednesday night make it easy to see why they could reach the first Final Four in program history, too.
Either is possible. Which way will the Vols break? Like most everything else with this team, it’s hard to know.