What Rick Barnes said about Tennessee's new-look roster and what's next for the Vols

What Tennessee Basketball coach Rick Barnes said while meeting with reporters Wednesday night at the Big Orange Caravan stop in Nashville:

How he feels about Tennessee’s roster after the rebuild in recruiting and the NCAA Transfer Portal 

“We do feel good about it. And and you’re right, the time (of year), it seems like we really, like probably every sport, talking to Josh (Heupel) coming over here, they haven’t really had any downtime either. It just runs from one season into it to the other. But I’m thankful and blessed that I think we’ve got the best staff in the country. And it’s year round. And we don’t ever get away from thinking about recruiting. What we’ve tried to do is stay with the model that we’ve always used. And we still believe in recruiting high school players, but knowing that the portal is there to help us supplement what we don’t feel like we have. And we believe in both of them. As excited as we are about our high school recruits coming in and our guys from the portal, probably the most exciting thing is that we didn’t lose anyone to the portal. And having those guys back, that’s the foundation of guys that have been, they’ve been to Elite Eights and they understand what it takes, not just to play in our league, but how to win in our league. We expect them to be leaders, to get our new group coming in, understand what it takes to win at the highest level.”

Tennessee’s success in the portal in the last two cycles and if the Vols have figured out the right formula

“I’m not sure it’s a formula. We have a formula. We bas it on how we put things down and how we evaluate. We’ve always believed in our own evaluation in terms of development and what we see and what we want. We addressed our needs immediately out of the portal. We felt like obviously we needed a point guard and we were able to get that with Ja’Kobi Gillespie. And then we felt like we needed to have a different look on the front line, and we’re able to do that with Jaylen Carey. Those were the two biggest needs for us coming out of the portal. Obviously, you look at the rest of the perimeter position, we’re happy with what we did with Amaree (Abram). And we announced today another player (Clarence Massamba) that we have coming from France that we’re excited about. Our staff, we’ve always believed that there’s no boundaries in how far we’ll go to look for players. And it goes back to the evaluations that we have and the contacts we have … there’s enough players out there for everybody. And our deal is that we just want to find the ones that we feel that fit us the way we want it to feel, in terms of our culture, how we want things to go. We’re excited, we are. And before you know it, we start right around June 1. We’ll be right back in. But they’ll show up before that to start getting ready for first session of summer school.”

Trying to establish loyalty and have multiyear players like Zakai Zeigler and Jahmai Mashack over the last four years 

“I think Cade Phillips said it best when we signed Jaylen Carey. And you think about it, Felix (Okpara) is coming back, who started. JP Estrella, who missed last year due to an injury, is back on the front line. We had signed Dewayne Brown, high school player of the year in Alabama. Cade played on the front line. And someone asked him about Jaylen coming in, and he said we want to win. And he said Tennessee’s home. 

“And we try to, honestly, through transparency, trying to be brutally honest with our guys and talk about where they really want to get, it’s all about competition. And we don’t do well in recruiting with players that want you to they say, how do you see my path? What we see is an opportunity. What we talk about is an opportunity. We’ve never promised anyone they’re going to start. We’ve never promised anyone they’re going to play a certain amount of minutes. We wouldn’t be recruiting you if we didn’t think you could do this. But you have to come in and you’ve got to earn it. And I think that when you get guys that are working as hard as the guys that, again, didn’t leave, they’ve invested in University of Tennessee themselves. They believe in themselves. And but the bottom line is they it’s not just about them. That’s our motto. It’s INAM. It’s not about me. But they truly want to win. And I think they do obviously love the University of Tennessee. I think they love Knoxville. They love they love our fanbase. 

“But to answer your question, and it’s a great one, it is rare today because you wonder if it’s going to be a one-year deal or two-year deal. But that’s why, again, we’re not afraid to recruit high school players knowing that we believe in our developmental program, but we talk about it. We’re not looking for guys that … we want guys that want to buy in to what we’re about and we’ve shown where guys have had great success doing what we do.”

How Tennessee will approach the last open scholarship spot on the roster

“We’ll leave that open. We really have three spots, basically, the new rules (if it goes to 15 scholarships). And unless something just drops in that we think that can help us, we wouldn’t do anything with it. We feel good where we are right now. But again, with the portal being what it is, still a lot of guys out there. Like I said, we recruit year round. I mean, if you go back to Santiago (Vescovi), we’ll always leave a spot because you go back to Santi. He came in in the middle of the year. There’ll be cases like that. So we always try to have at least one scholarship available for a situation like that.”

Indiana hiring Tennessee assistant coach Rod Clark

“Rod was great, but you know what? We feel we’ve got that position covered. Everything we do at Tennessee, it is not a one-man recruit. We have never done that. We have recruited as a staff. We believe in that because we just feel like situations like this (happen). We want everybody that we recruit to know everybody on our staff. We crisscross for that. He will,  I am sure, do a good job at Indiana. We’ve got it covered because there’s a lot of people that would obviously love to be at the University of Tennessee — in my job. We are excited about the direction that we are going and we’ve got it pretty much filled.”