University of Tennessee Athletics
Hard to Guard
October 29, 2016 | Men's Basketball
Hard to guard. If there’s one thing Rick Barnes is confident about as basketball season approaches, it’s the fact that his Volunteers will be a difficult squad to defend.
Tennessee has more depth and arguably more skill, from top to bottom, than it did a year ago. And while 21 preseason practices may not have revealed definitive starters yet, they have proven to Barnes that the Vols will be a tough scout.
“We play different than most teams,” Barnes said. “We are a team that likes to move offensively, and we are in attack mode. We knew what style we wanted to play, and we recruited toward it.”
Lew Evans, a first-year Vol who arrived in Knoxville as a graduate transfer who has played in two different Division I conferences, has the experience to weigh in on whether or not Tennessee’s system creates problems for opponents.
“Coach Barnes asks me all the time, ‘Lew, you’ve been in different programs, is this stuff hard to guard?’” Evans said. “And it is. It’s not just one action; it’s multiple actions happening at the same time. Defenses have to worry about where the ball is, there’s one action going on on this side of the floor, another action going on on the other side of the floor, and someone is at the top of the key. It’s hard to help on a back pick. It’s hard to guard, and I think it’s going to be very effective for us as a team.”
Barnes is entering his second season guiding the Vols, and the system and style he planned to implement when he was hired in March of 2015 is starting to take shape.
Sophomore forward Kyle Alexander can see it starting to materialize as well.
“This year we have more depth across all of our positions and more guys who are capable of making an impact,” Alexander said. “Last year we relied on (departed seniors Kevin Punter and Armani Moore) to do almost everything. Armani played every position, and we relied on KP for the majority of our points. This year, we have more guards who can come in and make plays. Coach Barnes did a really good job recruiting guards, and with the skill level those guys have, it will make it a lot easier for us because we have some playmakers and guys that know their roles. We have guys that are pass-first guards and other guards that know how to score. So they’ll know how to create opportunities for other people and get more touches inside for us bigs.”
Barnes expects any player who earns minutes this season to be able to create opportunities for their teammates. Playmaking responsibilities aren’t exclusive to perimeter players. That’s something each of Tennessee’s forwards are well aware of.
“You have to be a good passer,” Evans said. “Coach tells us all the time that we need to be players—we need to have a high basketball IQ. You need to be able to pass and make the right read every time down the floor. There’s so much going on that we can’t just go from A to B. You need to be thinking ahead and thinking about all the possible actions.”
With UT’s lone exhibition game less than a week away—the Vols host Slippery Rock Thursday at 7 p.m. ET at Thompson-Boling Arena—is this team ready to employ its offense?
“I do think we are grasping it,” Evans said. “This time of year gets tough, because you run the same stuff every single day against each other. Once we get out there on the floor and play somebody else, I think it’s going to flow for us. In practice, we know the plays, so sometimes you cheat it or you know what screen coming next. Once we start running it against other teams, it should flow a bit easier.”
True freshman forward Grant Williams also voiced optimism about the offensive system he and Tennessee’s six other first-year players have been learning and drilling since the summer.
“Our team is so versatile,” Williams said. “We’re so different when it comes to the system we run. It incorporates many reads. We read people’s bodies, we read where to go when a guy is guarding us a certain way. It’s really tough to prepare for that. When you’re running a high-low set where the ball is definitely going inside or going to the next option, that’s easy to guard. But when you’re guarding against multiple cut screens or multiple ball screens, guys stepping out… that’s really hard to prepare for and hard to defend against.
"Teams can only hope to contain it.”
