There’s a light up ahead of this exit
Texas has bright future despite tough loss to Tennessee
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Rodney Terry will have a summer to clean up all the turnovers, and a year to draw up a better play. The next time Texas needs a basket to extend its season, it probably won’t opt for a contested fadeaway 3-pointer from the corner with 10 seconds to spare.
But something else will change, too, and how Terry reacts to it figures to define the next phase of the Longhorns’ program. Saturday night, in a 62-58 second-round NCAA tournament loss to Tennessee, he was depending on good players who probably already peaked.
Starting next year, he’ll be able to call plays for the kind of prospect his old mentor Rick Barnes has now, with the type of potential Texas used to attract all the time.
And when that luxury arrives?
So will expectations, and everything that comes with them.
“We had the ball in the guys’ hands we wanted,” Terry said of the two most important shots in an often hideous but eminently winnable game, and there was nothing wrong with who the Longhorns chose.
To be clear, neither Dylan Disu nor Max Abmas is anything close to a scrub. One earned first-team All-big 12 honors this year. The other is the eighth-leading scorer in NCAA Division I history.
But neither owns the kind of body or skill set that makes NBA scouts take notice, and both have limitations that tend to get magnified against bigger, more talented teams like the Volunteers. The 6-foot-9 Disu couldn’t post up Tennessee’s behemoths like he did against overmatched defenders in the tournament last year, and the 6-0 Abmas rarely got a clean look at the rim.
Disu shot 4-for-18 from the field, and Abmas shot 3-for-10, but still both had a chance to be the hero. A short jumper by Disu that would have tied the score with a minute left spun off the rim, and Abmas tried to tie it by forcing a well-guarded 3-pointer that did not come close
with 10 seconds left.
“I thought I had a little bit of room to get it up,” Abmas said.
He didn’t, but on this Texas team it was hard to fault him for trying. The Longhorns played hard, and they scrapped and clawed on defense just like Barnes’ squads used to, but the other end of the floor often presented a struggle, and roster construction was part of the problem.
Earlier this week, when the NBA announced that it was disbanding the G League Ignite, which had served as an alternative for college recruits who wanted to get paid in the year before they became eligible for the draft, Terry jokingly asked why it couldn’t have happened a year earlier. His team could have used Ron Holland, the star teenager who reneged on his commitment to UT to sign with the Ignite last summer.
Without a clear-cut future pro on campus, and with several key pieces of last year’s Elite Eight trip gone, the hype around this season’s Longhorns was tempered. When they limped through the first part of the season, Terry caught some grief, but not much of it, because most people understood this probably never was going to be the kind of group to make a Final Four.
But the head coach is the man responsible for assembling groups that can, and Terry knows it. For next season, he’s signed a class led by two guards — Tre Johnson and Cam Scott — already projected as 2025 first-round draft picks. And as John Calipari can tell Terry this week, acquiring lottery talent doesn’t necessarily solve all your problems.
In the latter half of his 17-year Texas tenure, Barnes understood that, too. Kevin Durant, Avery Bradley, Tristan Thompson and Myles Turner are among his former players who’ve had long NBA careers, but none of those four guys made it past the first weekend of the NCAA tournament.
That didn’t stop the prospects from coming, though. And it hasn’t stopped Terry from pursuing them. Johnson and Scott probably will be one-and-done guys. But even a fifth-year senior like Disu said that’s exactly what the Longhorns need.
“These are big talents that Texas is used to,” Disu said, “and should be getting.”
They’re also the big talents that can make a difference in a game like Saturday’s, in which the Longhorns did a fine job defending Tennessee’s projected lottery pick, Dalton Knecht. Texas hounded him with doubleteams and multiple defenders. They forced him to miss 13 shots. And even though he got a big dunk and made the free throws to put the game away, Terry was able to find the bright side.
“We gave ourselves a chance,” Terry said.
That’s admirable, and not to be discounted.
But next year, when Terry looks at an NBA prospect and draws up a play to extend a season?
People will expect more than a chance.