Tennessee (1-0) opened its 2020-21 men’s basketball season Tueaday at Thompson-Boling Arena.
The Vols defeated Colorado, 56-47, in front of 4,191 in attendance.
Tennessee will return to action Saturday, hosting Cincinnati at 12:30 p.m. EST. The contest will be televised by SEC Network Alternate Channel.
Following Tennessee’s win over the Buffaloes, head coach Rick Barnes met with media. Below is a transcript from Barnes’ press conference provided by the University of Tennessee.
© Caitie McMekin/Pool via News Sentinel via Imagn Content Services, LLC
On what happened at 10 minutes in the first half when Colorado went zone:
“I thought once we were trying to figure out some substitution patterns, we knew going into the game tonight it would be first time we had our team on the same bench and we talked about it long and hard trying to figure out what would be the best way to do it to give every guy a chance to play well when they went out there and we definitely lost some of our rhythm, we started having some defensive breakdowns where when we were in some switching situations on the other end and we turned the ball over trying to do too much. They went zone and I don’t think that is what Tad wants to do, but he was willing to stay in it until we hurt it, which we never really did, and we wanted to get the ball in the middle which is what we have always done with it. I thought once we started missing those shots we had guys that were really hesitant to shoot those shots we needed to take and it affected us on the defensive end too where we got back on our heels, but you know they are going to make a run because they are too good of a team. We came out and got our transition going and doing a lot of good things, but once we started our substitute pattern that we have not had one bit of practice doing, that caught up with us and to take nothing away from them at all because I thought it was a really smart move on him to go zone because we haven’t had enough days since we were shut down to spend as much time on our zone offense as we had previously before we got shut down ourselves and we just weren’t sharp there. We got very hesitant and that’s something I am not concerned about, my biggest concern would be the fact that we didn’t rebound the ball the way we have to, to be the team we want to be, and that is probably the biggest disappointment is we didn’t rebound the ball the way we needed to.”