Tennessee was leading by three points coming out of a timeout with 23 seconds remaining at Reed Arena. With five seconds remaining on the shot clock, Rick Barnes drew up a play for Jordan Gainey to throw an alley oop to Felix Okpara.
But as Tennessee broke the huddle, senior point guard Zakai Zeigler had one thing to add.
“I knew the play we was running and I told Jordan (Gainey), I said, ‘yo, if you got to pass it to me, it’s going up and it’s going in. Simple as that,” Zeigler told ESPN postgame.
Zeigler was prophetic. Three weeks after his game winning triple rattled in-and-out at Auburn, the senior point guard caught Gainey’s pass and drilled a three-pointer on the left wing that proved the dagger in Tennessee’s 77-69 win over Texas A&M. Gainey and Zeigler combining for the game sealing play was fitting on an afternoon where Tennessee’s backcourt carried the Vols to their best win of the season to date.
Tennessee wouldn’t have been in position for Zeigler’s late shot to seal the game if it weren’t for the red-hot shooting of Chaz Lanier.
After another slow start, the senior shooting guard jolted Tennessee’s offense alive in the first half. Lanier’s three triples were Tennessee’s only made shots in the game’s first 10 minutes. He didn’t slow down either. Lanier missed his first shot from the field then proceeded to make eight of his next nine shots including six-of-seven attempts from three-point range.
“We wanted to spread them out and all we wanted to do with Chaz is get him a little bit of separation,” Barnes said postgame. “He’s gotten so much better he’s seen all kinds of defenses.
“As you know, he has got a quick release. But I love the fact he started, the last couple weeks, driving the ball downhill to make people not able to always just sit on his jump shot.”
By the time the first half was over, Lanier had 22 of Tennessee’s 36 points and had almost single-handedly pulled the Vols ahead of Texas A&M. He cooled down in the second half but added two more triples and scored a season-high 30 points on career-best eight made three-pointers.
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Lanier’s production was particularly important due to Zeigler’s struggles. The senior point guard played poorly for the game’s first 27 minutes. At that point, he had scored just three points with three turnovers to match his three assists.
But as Zeigler can do as well as anyone, he put the poor play in the rearview and scored 13 points, dished out four assists and didn’t turn the ball over. In winning time, Zeigler blocked a Wade Taylor IV three-point attempt and hit the game sealing triple.
“We’ve seen him do it. It seems like the bigger the moment, he thrives on that,” Barnes said. “At the end we really wanted to start driving really, really hard. We wanted to do that, try to play behind, because they do an incredible job of collapsing, going after the ball, breaking it loose. And I thought those drives were really key for him.”
Tennessee’s starting backcourt was hard to miss but sixth man Jordan Gainey’s play was crucial too. The Vols struggled to score at the basket against Texas A&M and he had two big buckets there while also getting to the foul line.
Gainey entered the game in the midst of a brutal shooting slump and had made just three-of-18 three-point attempts over the last five games. He missed his first three attempts on Saturday. But then Gainey drilled a pair of massive triples in the game’s final four minutes. The first gave Tennessee a four-point lead and the second pushed the advantage to six points.
Those three players combined to score 60 of Tennessee’s 76 points on a day the front court wasn’t productive. Zeigler has been consistent for Tennessee but the Vols have largely gone as Lanier and Gainey have gone this season.
Tennessee is now 16-0 when Lanier scores 18-plus points this season and also 16-0 when Gainey scores nine-plus points. Getting both, and the strong three-point shooting that usually accompanies it, was critical for the Vols in College Station and will be the rest of the season.
