Zakai Zeigler took the court in his normal role in the Tennessee starting lineup on Saturday night in the Vols’ second-round matchup against Texas.
After the first timeout of the game, head coach Rick Barnes kept Zeigler in the game. Same after the second timeout of the half, and the third.
Zeigler was then on the court to start the second half of play.
During a timeout in the second half, with the 5-foot-9 guard playing every minute of action to that point, Barnes looked at Zeigler in the huddle.
“You good?” Barnes said to Zeigler, as told by Josiah-Jordan James after the game.
“Zakai looked at him kind of crazy like, ‘of course I’m good. Why would you even ask me something like that?” James went on to recall.
Zeigler wound up playing all 40 minutes in Tennessee’s win over the Longhorns. Saturday’s game was only the third 40-minute contest of Zeigler’s career, following up on a 40-minute game against Texas A&M this season and a 40-minute showing against Mississippi State last season.
“He’s just a superhero,” James continued on to say about Zeigler. “We wouldn’t be in this position without his leadership, his aggressiveness. He’s the engine that ignites us. We thrive off of him. For him to play 40 minutes in a situation like this, I don’t think he’d want to have it any other way. That’s just a testament to how tough he is.”
Zeigler didn’t have his best shooting night against the Longhorns, going just 2-of-12 from the field for a total of six points – his lowest scoring output since a 2-point showing against South Carolina in January. But if Zeigler was playing badly and it was doing more harm than good to the team, Barnes and his coaching staff would have taken him out for a spell. It’s not like one sub would be the end of the world, after all. Barnes keeping Zeigler in for every minute of a wire-to-wire game shows just how important he is to the team.
“Even though he had a tough night shooting the ball, it’s just the little things that he does out there,” Barnes said of Zeigler. “The one stat that was probably good for us, I think their guards turned it over ten times, and we got ten extra shots. And the points off the turnovers was really probably the difference in the game really.”
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Zeigler was on his A-game against two talented Texas guards in Max Abmas and Tyrese Hunter. The starting duo scored 23 points for Texas tonight but it was on 21 attempts and nine shots from behind the arc to do so. Zeigler, Santiago Vescovi, and Jahmai Mashack routinely made Texas’ guard’s job more difficult throughout the night.
Despite only scoring six points, 5.8 points under his season average, Zeigler still came away with the third-highest plus/minus stat only trailing Josiah-Jordan James (28 minutes) and Jordan Gainey (15 minutes).
Saturday’s game was just the fourth NCAA Tournament game of Zeigler’s career as he missed all three games last season due to a torn ACL. Barnes spoke on Friday about how Zeigler’s DNA is one of the most impactful aspects of the Tennessee roster, which was quickly shown during a gutsy 40-minute performance in the tournament despite battling through a poor shooting night.
When asked about James’ story of Zeigler in the huddle after the game, Barnes gave his own side of things.
“I will tell you this, the most — and the coaches will learn to say it to me a certain way. They’ll say to me, ‘Hey, Coach, it’s 12:15 on the clock, 16 or whatever, do you think we should get Zakai out?’ And my answer is, ‘I’ll ask him.’ I’ll look at him. He’s an iron man. He never takes himself out in practice. Believe me, we practice hard. I asked him, I said, ‘You good? You good?’ And I trust him.”
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Barnes broke down the good of Zeigler’s game on Saturday, but it wouldn’t be a Rick Barnes press conference if he only talked about the good parts.
“But to answer that question, he was tired because they had a rim shot on that last possession down there, and he was the guy that didn’t block out. And he knows I’m going to get him for it because we kept talking about we can’t ever leave this tournament with somebody not blocking out,” Barnes said with a grin. “We were fortunate they missed that follow-up there at the end.”
Dalton Knecht is Tennessee’s top scorer. Jonas Aidoo is Tennessee’s biggest X-Factor game-to-game.
Zakai Zeigler, though? He’s the iron man of the team. The superhero who is looking to carry Tennessee to safety on the other side of the treacherous river that is the NCAA Tournament. And he very well might just be getting started.
and we’re not done yet#MarchMadness pic.twitter.com/LFYGjefCTQ
— Tennessee Basketball (@Vol_Hoops) March 24, 2024
