Rick Barnes not using injured starters as excuse for Kentucky loss

Tennessee coach Rick Barnes isn’t making any excuses following a 66-54 loss to Kentucky on Saturday. Although the Volunteers were down two starters in Julian Phillips and Josiah-Jordan James, Barnes believes refused to point to that as the reason they lost.

“I told the guys in the room, ‘We’ll get everybody back, but we had enough,'” Barnes said postgame. “‘We brought enough guys here to win this game.’ I believe that was their team, their players, but that’s with everybody doing their job. We’ve got a group of guys that work hard and do it, but it comes back to consistency. We know how people are gonna play us. They didn’t show us anything. They didn’t do one thing that we were caught off guard by.”

Rick Barnes instead pointed to a lack of defense in the first half that got Tennessee into a hole against Kentucky. The Volunteers entered halftime trailing 39-19 after allowing the Wildcats to shoot 12-of-28 (42.9%) from the floor. It also didn’t help that Tennessee couldn’t buy a bucket itself, shooting 7-of-27 (25.9%).

Things improved in the second half, but not quite enough for the Volunteers to earn the win. Tennessee cut the lead down to eight with around seven minutes remaining, but ultimately trailed the entire way as they fell to 20-7 (9-5 SEC).

“You go back (to) the second half was more like our defense (allowed) 27 points,” Barnes said. “I mean we gave up 39 points in the first half. We weren’t very good. A lot of that stemmed from our offense allowing them to get out a couple times and make some shots. They only shot eight 3s. We knew what we had to do. We just didn’t do it in the first half. We came back and we scored 35. We should’ve scored 45 and we didn’t.”

The loss was the third in the past four games for Tennessee. The Volunteers were coming off of a victory against No. 1 Alabama earlier in the week, and are currently projected as a three seed according to Joe Lunardi.

With four games remaining in the regular season, Tennessee will hope to get James and Phillips healthy soon. Their next opportunity to play comes against Texas A&M at 7 p.m. ET on Tuesday in College Station.