Dalton Knecht's big second half wakes up Tennessee after hot start by Missouri

Tennessee came out and laid a bit of a dud in the early going against a winless-in-league-play Missouri team on Tuesday night, but Dalton Knecht and the rest of the team woke up in the second half to help secure a 72-67 win.

It was a bit of a slog to get there. Missouri led 1-0 at the first TV timeout of the game, and there wasn’t a whole lot of offense in the opening 20 minutes.

Coach Rick Barnes got after his team at halftime.

“Yeah he just said we didn’t come out to execute, and he got on us just to go out and perform like we usually do,” Dalton Knecht said on the SEC Network after the game. “We deserved it. I mean we didn’t come out, we came out flat. And we just got tons of energy, got ourselves going and started playing like ourselves.”

Tennessee scored 46 points in the second half, aided by a great night by Knecht. He scored 17 in the contest, with 15 of them coming after halftime.

Teammates forced him into the spotlight.

“My teammates said time for you to take over and be you and they just fed me the ball in the right spots,” Dalton Knecht said. “Same with the coaching staff, they put me in the right spots and I just felt comfortable and it just started going in for me, just the flow of the game and I just started making my shots.”

As Knecht got rolling, the game slipped away from the Tigers. Frankly, they just don’t have the personnel to hang with Tennessee when the Volunteers are firing on all cylinders.

And with Knecht on a roll…

“It always feels good. When you’re in that zone, you feel like you can’t miss, it’s one of the best feelings in the world,” Dalton Knecht said. “I mean all of us can say that. I feel like when you’re in that zone your teammates know and they just keep feeding you the ball. And we all do that. I mean if Z(akai Zeigler) gets hot, Santi(ago Vescovi), Josiah(-Jordan James), Jonas (Aidoo), Tobe (Awaka), (Jordan Gainey), it don’t matter who, we’re going to keep feeding them the ball and we’re going to trust them.”

Even so, Missouri managed to fight until the end. Tennessee threatened to blow it open, but the Tigers kept hanging around, enlivened by a fairly rowdy crowd, given the circumstances.

“We know they had a lot of close games, so they could have won a lot of them,” Dalton Knecht said. “We know we had to take care of business. We watched film of last year and stuff, and we knew we just had to come out and be ready for it. They’re a physical team and we had to come out and be ready to battle, and we had to execute in the second half.”

With the win in the bag, Tennessee fans can now exhale. For a minute on Tuesday, it looked like the unthinkable might happen.

But Dalton Knecht views the fight as a positive.

“It’s good. It proves if we can put two halves together we’re going to be real dominant,” he said. “The second half we showed that, so we’ve just got to put two halves together. We’ll watch film and trust the coaches, watch film, listen to them and get ready for practice and then go out and execute next game.”