The word easy is not something Tennessee basketball associates itself with.
After building a 23-point lead halfway through the second half, the Vols journeyed down a familiar path. Mississippi State embarked on a monster 18-0 run to cut Tennessee’s lead to just five points in a matter of moments. The blown-lead demons didn’t fully possess head coach Rick Barnes’ group this time around, but they had the Vols on the edge of devastation before they escaped with a 73-64 win.
“It goes back to concentration and not getting relaxed,” Barnes said. “That’s kind of been the story of our team. We get a lead, and we start doing those things.
“I think we’ve got a team that plays hard. They want to do the right thing, but our passing is not crisp. I mean, we throw some horrendous passes. We’ve got to get better with that, and we harp on it all the time.”
Tennessee committed three turnovers during the Bulldogs’ second-half run alone, a pair of which immediately led to easy buckets. The Vols coughed up 11 giveaways in all.
The ability for Tennessee to compete up to standard for a full 40 minutes of basketball continues to be a driving theme of the last handful of weeks in SEC play. After outscoring Mississippi State 39-28 in the first half, the Bulldogs dictated the tempo for much of the final stanza, pacing the Vols 36-34 on the scoreboard.
“We just got a little stagnant,” forward J.P. Estrella said. “Messed up a couple of ball screen situations on defense. We had a couple of mental breakdowns. We talked about it in the locker room afterwards. In those situations, we got to make sure that we got to put it away when the time comes.”
Following a game where the Vols blew a 14-point lead to Kentucky, Wednesday night’s near-nightmare turned win over one of the SEC’s cellar dwellers didn’t bring the usual satisfaction of a road triumph.
Tennessee did improve mightily around the rim, though, racking up 42 paint points while converting on seven slams. The lob game made its way back into the Vols’ offensive scheme after resting dormant over a close-range scoring slump. One of the nation’s top rebounding squads made most of their 13 offensive boards matter, cashing in 15 second-chance tallies to help survive an upset.
Without this higher success rate down low, Tennessee very well could be staring another ugly result in the face. With the tough brunt of their league schedule over with, the Vols know they still have plenty to tune up before postseason play. A win over the Bulldogs is a win. For now.
Come March, it’s going to take 40 minutes.
“I think it’s a little bit more frustration for us because it’s been a common theme with this group,” forward Nate Ament said. “Get up early, be a good first-half team, and the second half kind of die down. I feel like just for us, we got to continue to put our foot on the gas, be even more aggressive than we were in the first half.”
