Tennessee basketball coach Rick Barnes met with the local media on Friday afternoon before the Vols travel to Athens to face a Georgia team riding a 10-game winning streak.
Barnes put a final bow on the Vols’ loss at Mississippi State, discussed the red-hot Georgia team and much more. Here’s everything Barnes said.
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On if he liked what Freddie Dilione V gave Tennessee defensively at Mississippi State
“I thought he did (play well defensively). I thought he came in and did that. And again, I thought one, it was the best really prep he’s had prior to the game. I thought he was really locked in, asking questions from coaches about not just what they do, but also wanting to know, to make sure he knew what we were trying to get done. And that’s obviously a great sign. And again, I hope he can continue to build on it.”
On the next step in his progression
“Just to build consistency. That’s what it is, being consistent. And with every player, it’s all about trust, earning trust and knowing what, when you put someone out there, you really have a pretty good idea of what you’re going to get.”
On Tennessee searching for consistency and needing veterans like Santiago Vescovi and Josiah-Jordan James to play better on the road
“It’s tough, but again, consistency comes in a lot of different shapes and forms. And it’s just details. It’s getting down the games, whether you’re defensively, you could be a step really that far out of your gap, be that far away from the guy when you don’t block him out. You could be that far away when you should get a rebound, you should have. It’s all about details and competing. We need everybody. There’s so much balance in the country. We’ve seen that all year really from the beginning of the year. On any given night, anybody can win. But we need those guys to do what we know they’re capable of doing.”
On if there’s more than just the arm bar that Tennessee forwards can do to better defend opposing post players
“No. They have to do that. They were just giving into it. I think they were worried so much about (Tolu Smith) spinning off that they were (not using the arm bar). They know that he loves to go to baseline and I think they were too conscious of that. But when he kept getting back inside, they were giving up an angle for him, which you can’t do. Obviously we want people to have to shoot over top of us and that’s when Jonas (Aidoo), the length is at its best when it’s close to the rim. But our guards actually did a pretty good job, because they got below him and got leverage. But we need our post guys to do that.”
On where this Tennessee needs to improve on the road
“I don’t care if we’re at home, on the road. I don’t think it that matters. It’s about winning and it’s about you’re going to be in a close game, whether you’re here, on the road. And you’ve got to execute any time you come down the last four minutes of the game. It’s going to get down to execution on the road, the defensive end and the offensive end.”
On what stands out about Georgia
“Well, one, they’ve got to be a confident team. Obviously they’ve won 10 in a row, they’re off to a good start shoot the ball well. I think they really have gelled in the fact that they know exactly how they want to play. A lot of one-on-one. Mike (White has) done a great job of putting them in position where they’re confident and know that they get into their offense quick. Any shot they see opening, they’re going to take it. And Mike’s a terrific coach and I’m not surprised at where he got the program right now.”
On Dalton Knecht getting going offensively against Mississippi State
“Well, it was good. I mean, obviously we need that. And again, we need him to continue to, again, consistency. We need that, we need to get everybody going with it. I do know he’s making a conscious effort to try to be better defensively and we need him to do that.”
On balancing how well Zakai Zeigler is playing with not wearing him down with 35-plus minutes a game
“It’s tough. It really is because you go into every game with a plan and it goes back— you feel like you want to put the ball inside, but you put it there, then guys are getting stripped. You’re not getting that, so now you have to go a different way. Zakai was really the only guy the other night creating foul situations, you know, picking up fouls. But if there’s anybody that can play a lot of minutes and withstand it, it’s him. But there is a line there that we’d like to keep him under. But I talk about it game-to-game. You got to try to win that game and we have to do what we have to do.”
On if that creates more urgency for other guards to play better
“Well, yeah, you’d like for them (to) but it goes back to that word we keep talking about— consistency. What are we going to get? Obviously we know what we’re getting from him. It’s what can we get from the other guys? The older guys, we’ve got to know that. And then you can give these younger guys— you can’t put a younger guy in a game in a situation where, like, what we’ve tried to do this year is get those guys out there with an older group of guys, and if they’re not playing well, it’s hard to get them in a game because it really puts a lot of pressure on them. If they could have a couple bad moments that could affect them for a long time.”
On where Dalton Knecht’s grown defensively
“Just trying. I think it is all effort. I think defense is effort. Obviously anticipation, but it’s a want to. And, again, I know he wants to be better.”
On what’s going wrong for Jordan Gainey right now
“I’ve seen shooters go through it and (he’s) probably trying too hard and we want him to shoot it when he’s open. But he doesn’t have to force anything. He doesn’t have to do that because he can do other things. But that part he’ll snap out of that. It’s just a matter of when.”
On the challenge of guarding a Georgia team with a lot of shooters
“We’ve dealt with that a lot the last couple years. I mean, you go back and look and there’s a lot of teams doing that and got to be able to do a lot of different things. Against pressure, they get into a quick ball screen a lot and they spread you out and they’ve got guys that are going to shoot the ball when they’re open and it’s tough. You got to do a lot of multiple things. You got to handle the action at the ball, but you got to have those guys on the back side ready to rotate and try to keep the ball in front of them.”
On if he’s thinking about running the full-court press more after it was so successful at Mississippi State
“We can do it. Every game takes on a personality with it. If you do it all the time — I can tell you when we’ve played against pressing teams, normally we’d try to press ’em back, but when you know it’s coming all the time, you can deal with it. Like, we knew they were going to go out to their 2-2-1, but it didn’t affect us at all because it’s there. Do we like the element of surprise? We do, but we really leave it up to our players. They know if they think they can get a shot to go run and trap, they can. But we wanna be a team that can play 94 feet.”
On the key to Tobe Awaka and Jonas Aidoo staying out of foul trouble
“That’s doing your work early. Normally when you foul, you get behind, you slap down because you’re not in position. It all goes back to being alert. I’ve used the term all the time, do your work early so you’re not playing catch up. When you play catch up, you probably feel like you’re desperate and you swipe down or you don’t get out there in time. You hit somebody, hip check them or whatever it may be. It’s just alertness and attention to detail.”
On if the issues defending Mississippi State’s Tole Smith were issues in the games against Kansas, Purdue and North Carolina earlier in the year
“They’re all different. All good post players know where they want the ball. They know where they wanna get it. That’s what I’ve told our guys. I don’t care if it’s (Zach) Edey, (Armando) Bacot, Tolu (Smith), they know where they want the ball and they don’t settle. And that’s where he knows he’s — other than his dunk, I think he (Smith) scored every bucket below the rim because he knows how to angle. He gets you where he wants to get you to start with and he fights for his space. And that’s why any low post player, that’s good, he knows where he wants it and if he doesn’t get it there, he’s gonna find a way to get it there. He’s not just gonna settle and those guys, any good low post player is good because they know where they want the ball and where they have to be.”
