Vols limping to SEC finish line
At SEC Men’s Basketball Media Day in October, Robert Hubbs was seated at a round table, surrounded by reporters at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville.
One question that kept coming up more than others regarded where Tennessee was picked by the media in the preseason SEC basketball poll.
The Vols were projected 13th in their 14-team league, and inquiring minds wanted to know what Hubbs thought about it. He wasn’t mad, he said. Instead, he understood. Who had seen this team — one with eight freshmen on roster, to just three upperclassmen — actually together on the floor? The answer, Hubbs said, was no one on the outside. Slowly but surely the young Vols started surprising those outsiders.
They hung around with ranked teams in Wisconsin and Oregon during the Maui Invitational in November. They built a 15-point first-half lead on the road at North Carolina in December.
Tennessee upset Texas A&M, picked to finish third in the league by media in the preseason, to start SEC play. A four-game win streak in late January put the relatively unknown Vols into the NCAA tournament bubble conversation.
The last 17 days, though, have been spent coming back down to earth.
Tennessee (15-14, 7-9 SEC) has lost five of seven games since that four-game win streak that changed its season.
The Vols play at LSU (9-19, 1-15), the league’s worst team and loser of 15 straight games, on Wednesday (TV: SEC Network Alternate, 7 p.m.).
Have opponents finally figured this Tennessee team out as the late-season struggles continue?
“I think as year goes on and the season keeps winding down,” second-year Tennessee coach Rick Barnes said on Monday, “your team’s intensity has to go one way or the other.
“I do think familiarity and people watching you play affects working through situations with your team.”
The situation at Mississippi State on Feb. 4 was a 19point lead that the Vols couldn’t hold.
Tennessee answered with a late rally to beat Ole Miss at home on Feb. 8, but then turned around and gave up a 14-point lead against Georgia in a 76-75 loss on Feb. 11.
Giving up leads hasn’t been a problem in the last three losses.
The Vols averaged just 56.3 points per game — 19 points below the season scoring average — while losing by an average of 21 points per game against No. 9 Kentucky, Vanderbilt and South Carolina.
“I think with our team that our guys are playing hard,” Barnes said, “but I also think other teams are playing hard too.”
Tennessee has dealt with both injuries and a dismissal this season.
Freshman forward John Fulkerson (dislocated elbow) has been out since Dec. 15. Junior guard Detrick Mostella, at the time the team’s second-leading scorer, was dismissed for a violation of team rules in early January.
Hubbs, Tennessee’s senior guard and leading scorer, has been dealing with a nagging right knee injury over the last month, having the knee drained twice.
“Whether it is guys in the lineup and out of the lineup,” Barnes said, “injuries, dismissals, whatever it may be, you have to keep your team focused and keep going.”
Barnes said other teams go through these stretches, too. South Carolina had lost four of five before dropping the Vols.
Vanderbilt, a team Tennessee beat by 12 on the road in January, is as hot as any team in the league, including a wire-to-wire win in Knoxville a week ago.
“Those two teams at the beginning of the year were considered NCAA teams,” Barnes said. “I think with their experience coming down the stretch that they are really focused.”
And maybe that’s what his team has been lacking down the stretch, even if it looks like other opponents have figured out the young Vols, who look like they’re running out of gas.
“I don’t know if it’s just familiarity with your opponent and all that,” Barnes said, “but it’s also about guys understanding that you can have no distractions whatsoever.”