No. 19 Tennessee is back home in a unique situation and looking to recover after Saturday’s difficult loss to LSU.
The Vols (14-5, 7-5 SEC) host South Carolina (5-9, 3-7) on Wednesday in a 9 pm Eastern Time complaint at Thompson-Boling Arena. The game will be televised on the SEC Network.
The two teams were scheduled to play Tuesday night in Knoxville, but the game was postponed one day by the Southeast Conference after the Vols had a positive COVID test returned on Sunday. The new test was carried out on Monday afternoon and the results allowed today’s game to be played, but Tennessee could run out of players due to the COVID protocol.
Tone Hart will be at stake at stake and Pat Sundvold will provide analysis on the SEC Network broadcast, which can be broadcast on ESPN.com or the ESPN app. Bob Kesling and Bert Bertelkamp will have the play-by-play radio for The Vol Network. The broadcast can be heard on the satellite radio on Sirius’ Channel 133 and XM’s Channel 190.
Tennessee was initially scheduled to play in South Carolina on January 12, but the game was postponed due to problems with COVID in South Carolina. That game has not yet been rescheduled.
The Vols are 6-5 in the last 11 SEC games, while Gamecocks have lost seven of their last nine, including the last three.
Here’s what Rick Barnes said of tonight’s game during his weekly press conference on Monday:
IN SOUTH CAROLINA
“As you know, your teams are always playing hard. They are a little different from a year ago because of the time they lost. I mean, there is no better coach in the country, and your team has in its DNA, the ability to play. very hard, turn people around and hit the ball. I think now they are playing with the tenth fastest pace in the country, which is not what I think you would associate with it. But he did an unbelievable job in the amount of time he had to practice to make the adjustments he made. Whenever you face this team, it will be a very disputed basketball game, because they will compete at all levels. They will play each ball as if it mattered. I said, they’re in the gaps and they do a great job in the gap lanes. In the past, they could have been on the overtaking lanes more, but executing the kind of defense that he normally likes to do takes time and a lot of daily work and day no one teaches better than him. So, he had to make some adjustments, which is why he is the coach he is ”.
WHAT YOU GOT UP WHEN WATCHING THE LSU LOSS FILM
“I thought we had a lot of defensive collapses. There were some actions on the ball screen at the beginning of the game, not being matched – which you can’t do. We gave up on a few baskets, where I think some guys were there a long time in the second half and didn’t come back to define our defense the way we should. I think young people are trying to do a lot, which is not necessarily their fault. They are going to have to understand what is too much and what is not enough and go straight to the middle We knew we would go through a little bit of this when we started playing more for the guards than for the inside – we still need an inside game. We need Yves and John looking for shots, and they had the opportunity to catch them and wait a long time. We have great looks when they managed to stretch the game. They did some trios and we had some very open looks that we just didn’t do. It felt like we were fighting up the whole game for a long time because of some collapses that we didn’t have as often as you might think, and our one-on-one defense – they hurt us to the point where they were able to break us in some straight-line attacks. “