Tennessee was neck-and-neck with Kansas with 12 minutes remaining. The Vols’ offense hadn’t been perfect or shot great but they were overall getting good looks and had 49 points through the game’s first 12 minutes.
And then the all-to familiar happened with Tennessee. Its offense collapsed and the Vols couldn’t get shots to fall. From that point on, Tennessee made just three field goals over the next 10 minutes and totaled just 11 points the rest of the game.
Kansas finally got its turnover issues under control, kept getting solid looks at the rim and opened up a lead and coasted to a 69-60 victory.
The offensive issues down the stretch were all too familiar for Tennessee. The Vols shot just 21% from three-point range down in the second half and kept attempting them with little semblance of an inside scoring threat.
“I don’t want to be a team where we’re making threes, it’s all going great,” Tennessee coach Rick Barnes said postgame. “We’re not, we’re not.”
With Tobe Awaka banged up and a bit undersized against Kansas’ Hunter Dickinson and Zakai Zeigler struggling so far this season, Tennessee’s offense was going to be reliant on Dalton Knecht.
Knecht did not play well against Kansas and didn’t play well in the second half of the Purdue game on Tuesday night. Knecht scored just 13 points on four-of-17 shooting including one-of-eight shooting in the second half.
The bad reality for Tennessee’s offense is that they’re very viable to fall apart offensively if Knecht struggles on that end. Particularly if he can’t score at the basket. Even past Knecht, Tennessee has more viable offensive options than they had last season.
More From RTI: Everything Rick Barnes Said After Tennessee Lost To Kansas
But besides Santiago Vescovi, all those options are role players and they are very capable of having bad shooting nights— particularly the returning players.
“Just disappointed with our inconsistency,” Barnes said. “We’re just inconsistent. We need to know night to night what we’re gonna get.”
That’s what I view as the negative reality for Tennessee’s offense. They might not be completely lost without Knecht scoring, but they will be inconsistent on offense if the Northern Colorado transfer isn’t.
But there’s another side to the coin. It was just one bad game. Tennessee’s offense struggled at time against Purdue but still found a way to score a respectable 67 points. That game was so heavily officiated that it felt hard to draw any true conclusions from.
Tennessee missed a number of good looks at or around the rim. Jonas Aidoo, Zakai Zeigler and Jahmai Mashack all missed decent looks around the basket. And while those three aren’t consistent inside scorers, Knecht missed three shots at the rim in the second half that he hasn’t hardly missed all season.
If he gets those three baskets to go it’s a much tighter in the final minutes.
“We missed too many layups today,” Barnes said. “Way, way (too many) at the rim that we’ve gotta make. And it seemed like they made all theirs. And we gotta get back to where we can finish those, some way, somehow get to the free-throw line.”
Then there’s the simple fact that Tennessee was playing its second high intensity game in less than a 24 hour time frame. That’s a pretty legitimate excuse for poor perimeter shooting though the Vols shouldn’t have gotten suckered into 33 three-point attempts.
Perhaps the most encouraging thing to take out of the bad offensive performance is that Barnes rolled with Knecht and Gainey in winning time despite neither having great games. Entering this season, I wondered whether Barnes would turn to his best defensive unit in a game like this and leave the offensively talented newcomers on the bench.
The ninth-year Tennessee coach didn’t do that. That’s a good sign.
Any concerns about Tennessee’s offense after the Kansas loss are fair. If Knecht isn’t productive on the offensive end, inconsistencies are going to follow. But I’m hesitant to say that this is just like last season and Tennessee is going to struggle to score against any strong defense.
Maybe those fears will prove true but there’s reasons to think the alternative.
