Tennessee head coach Rick Barnes met with the media following this afternoon’s loss at Kentucky.
The Volunteers came into Kentucky after knocking off No. 1 Alabama, so Barnes talked about trying to find consistency from his team.
Check out everything Barnes said:
Transcript:
On what the difference was between the first half and the second half…
“Well, it goes back to consistency when we get night in and night out certainly Zakai (Zeigler),
you know didn’t have a terrific game and he means a lot to our team. Everybody knows that
and his fouls hurt us and then I thought early in the game our shot selection wasn’t very good
and I thought our guys allowed that to seep into the defensive side of the court. Again, not
everyone is just locked in the way we need to be. You can’t miss that many free throws like we
did with those situations and the rim shots are the tough ones too. I mean, I think one and
ones, we ended up four for 18 if you count the one and ones from the free throw line. And the
second half we obviously opened up the court, drove the ball, and they had a hard time with
that and we had chances. I mean, our turnovers in the second half really hurt us. I mean we
had, you know a timeout, turned it over, a free throw. They missed some free throws, gave us a
chance to rebound the ball, throw it away coming down and transition and I just felt if we could
have gotten it within five, four points, it would have made it a little bit more difficult because
we were going to make them make a shot and that’s what bothered me that we allowed them
to back cut when we were really in a contained type defense, gave us some back cuts and failed
in areas that we shouldn’t have and put them on the line and as opposed to making them make
some shots.”
On what he needs to do to get consistency from his team at this point in the year…
“I wish I knew, I wish I knew, but we’d fix it and it’s just – I think it goes back and I don’t
understand that to be quite honest with you. As much time as we spend with our guys talking
about doing your job, playing your role night in and night out, and not letting emotion get the
best of us during times. Again, we played hard in the second half but when you do come back,
emotion starts to kick in. You still got to make smart plays. We just had too many plays in the
second half and they gave us some chances. They did open the door for us and, you know, we
pretty much had to have a chance but every time we had a chance to come down we’d miss rim
shots. I wish I knew the answer to that, I really do as much as the times we spent talking about
it – I wish we could figure it out.”
On how much he was challenged from being down two starters…
“You know I told the guys in the room, you know we’ll get everybody back but then we had
enough. We brought enough guys here to win this game. You know I believe that with our team
players, everybody doing your job and we got a group of guys that work hard. They do it but it
goes back to consistency and we know how people want to play us. They didn’t show us
anything to do one thing. We were caught off guard but we didn’t. But at some point in time, I
mean, you go back second half, was more like our defense, 27 points. I mean, we gave up 39
points in the first half and we weren’t very good. I mean, we weren’t and it was a lot of that
stemmed from our offense, allowing them to get out a couple times and make some shots. But
they only shot eight threes and we knew what we had to do. We just didn’t do it in first and
second half again. We came back and we scored 35. We should have scored 45 – we
