Rick Barnes rips Tennessee over three-point attempt total vs. Kentucky

The Tennessee Volunteers dropped a home game to the Kentucky Wildcats on Tuesday night, in no small part because it was the Wildcats who had the advantage shooting the ball. For head coach Rick Barnes, a big reason for that gap was simply the Volunteers’ shot selection.

Following the game, Barnes was asked about how many deep shots Tennessee took and he ripped into his team over their three-point attempt total. In particular, he was frustrated that they’re not a good enough shooting team to play like that and that they needed to get inside more.

“No, no,” Rick Barnes said. “Absolutely not, and again, it goes back — we’ve talked about it, but it’s hard to get the ball inside when you’re not making threes because they’re just going to keep backing up. They’ve got good length. They’re going to play personnel. You could tell they really wanted to try to take away the lob tonight. Make Zakai [Zeigler] go in and see if he could finish enough, and stay with some shooters with that penetration. But it is no different than everybody. We’ve been played the same pretty much all year.”

For the game, Tennessee took 45 three-point shot attempts compared to just 24 attempts by Kentucky. Despite that, the Wildcats made more threes, hitting 12 for 50 percent compared to 11 by the Volunteers for 24.4 percent. On top of that, Kentucky outshot Tennessee from the field generally, making 50 percent of their shots overall while Tennessee only made 34.7 percent.

“And some of the threes at the end, it’ll look different because, at the end, when we weren’t necessarily looking for the three there at the end when we were down,” Barnes said. “But they were back in there. Then, at the end, they were starting to switch it, which you would expect them to do.”

There were some things Tennessee did well. 21 offensive rebounds bought the Volunteers extra possessions and they also won the turnover battle. However, Rick Barnes still knows his team’s issues went beyond just shooting.

“But we had some turnovers, a couple things that we can’t do. We can’t come out of a time out, dribble the ball out of bounds, come out and not execute what we’re trying to do. Little things,” Barnes said.

“But again, give them credit, we’ve got to be better. And again, it’s just, I wasn’t real happy with their mindset defensively at the start of the game. But give them credit, they run good offense like teams in our league do. But I just thought we let them get relaxed and they took advantage of it.”

Tennessee will have a chance to bounce back with a stronger performance on Saturday when they host the Florida Gators for a major test.