Rick Barnes previews Tennessee-Appalachian State

On if the veterans struggle to find their roles much like the new guys do:
“Can it be tough? Yeah, but I think all of us early in the year are trying to figure it out. But, when you have a group of unselfish guys like we have—I think our guys really have great respect for the work we put into our program. I think they understand that there’s no one that doesn’t work hard. Are their guys that work harder? Absolutely. Are there guys that put more time in than others? Absolutely. For the older guys, the more versatile they become, the more effective they become for you. I’ve watched Josiah now where he’s gotten to the point where he can play pretty much every position on the floor now, which is going to help him in so many different ways. Is he going to play a bit of a different role? He’s going to do a little bit of everything. Last year he didn’t have the advantage of having someone coming in when things weren’t going well. For the most part, he had to get those lessons taught the hard way. I don’t think we have a team that we have to do that with this year, but I do know that he’s going to buy into whatever we need him to do. We know E.J. will as well. We need to get Olivier going to the point—we know how good he can be and he hasn’t figured it out yet. The last two days he’s been better, but a big part of it is that when you’re coaching guys and you ask about roles and things like that, it all goes back to buying into the program and what you have to do. When Grant Williams started out, we went through all of the same things with him until he realized that he had to do certain things a certain way and once you get a few things down, then you can build on it. It still goes back to that word consistency. No matter what role guys are playing in, they have to show consistency to where they understand what we’re trying to accomplish as a team every possession. We have a saying that ‘Every possession matters.’ The guys that play the most minutes understand that simple fact that every possession matters both offensively and defensively.”