Barnes: Vols don’t have toughness late in season

BATON ROUGE, La. — The message from Rick Barnes to his struggling Tennessee basketball team has been a consistent one. All the Vols have to worry about, all they have to play for, is the next game on the schedule.

“It’s what we’ve been telling them for the last week and a half,” Barnes said.

The message didn’t translate at LSU on Wednesday, during a 92-82 loss at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center. It hasn’t translated over the last month, either, as Tennessee (15-15, 7-10 SEC) has lost six of eight games, including five of the last six.

Now the regular-season finale against Alabama (17-12, 10-7) on Saturday at Thompson-Boling Arena and an SEC tournament game Thursday at Bridgestone Arena is all that stands between the Vols and whatever is next.

“This time of year it’s simple,” Barnes said. “Teams that want to keep playing, they do. And the ones that don’t, they’ll be finished real soon.”

If the want-to was there Wednesday, it didn’t show in the second half.

LSU, which shot 50 percent from the field on the night, used an 11-0 run to take control, leading by as many as 14 while Tennessee went 1-for-17 from the floor over the first 16 minutes after halftime.

“The bottom line is you really have to show toughness this time of year,” Barnes said. “If you’re going to be a team that’s going to play in the postseason and be a team that finishes strong in your conference, you have to be tough.

“You have to get guard play, you have to get post play, you have to get all that. But you have to show some toughness.”

This young group of Vols built an identity with its toughness early in the season, sticking around against ranked opponents before finally breaking through with an upset of No. 4 Kentucky at Thompson-Boling Arena, eventually stringing together enough wins to enter the NCAA tournament bubble talk.

Now Tennessee is trying desperately to reestablish that same toughness.

“Stick to the game plan,” sophomore guard Shembari Phillips said after scoring 16 points in 32 minutes at LSU, “stick to what we know, stick to what we can do and stick to who we are. Don’t steer from that.

“That’s what we’ve been doing lately, steering away from who we are, what we actually do. We have to get back to doing what we do.”

The Vols are running out of time to do so. After a February spent reeling, and Wednesday’s loss at LSU to start March, Tennessee has gone from a bubble team to one that has a steep hill to climb just to reach the NIT.

But this team says the message can’t change, not as long as there’s another game to be played.

“It shouldn’t change,” freshman forward Grant Williams said. “It’s never over because we have a whole (SEC) tournament left. If guys are thinking it’s over, it’s nowhere close.

“It’s going to depend on how we do on Saturday against Alabama and then what we do in the tournament. We can’t worry about anything else. We just have to keep playing.”