Willie Nelson said it best: Turn out the lights, the party’s over. Only this time, it was the nice, little four-game winning streak.
Kentucky toppled Tennessee, 74-71, Saturday late-night in Lexington. Or maybe the Vols did it to themselves. They blew a 14-point halftime lead, missed an astounding assortment of shots and unraveled. The net result was an inexplicable second half. You could call it a maddening collapse.
Vol for life Chris Lofton, analyst and color commentator for the Vol Network, had a colorful summation – mind-boggling, Kentucky made the winning plays, too many layups, Kentucky wanted it more, a matter of heart and hustle.
Rick Barnes didn’t see it that way.
“I don’t think there’s any question our guys wanted to win and they played hard. And Kentucky is a really good basketball team.”
The coach said his “guys are really disappointed. We think that we are as good as anybody that we play on any given night. But we can’t make the mistakes we made.
“And we need some of those baskets at the rim to take the pressure off the perimeter guys. We’ve got to get some of them.”
Coach, how can you make big guys hit short shots?
“I wish I knew. I don’t have an answer right now. I wish I did. But we got to believe in them, and they got to believe in themselves. And we got to take what they give us. And that’s what they were giving us, and we just didn’t finish it.”
Tennessee hit 20 percent in the second half.
The Wildcat comeback victory was too similar to what happened three weeks ago in Knoxville. That time, the Vols blew a 17-point lead.
Count this as another landmark triumph for UK coach Mark Pope. He now has a 4-1 lead over Barnes, a legendary leader on a direct route to the college basketball hall of fame.
Vol freshman Nate Ament did not lose the game. He scored 19 points in the last 10 minutes of the first half. He finished with 29 on 10-of-17 shooting. He made four of six threes. He hit five of six free throws. He had eight rebounds. He was not spectacular on defense and he had four turnovers.
Senior guard Ja’Kobi Gillespie didn’t do enough to win. He had 14 points in the hot first half (Tennessee shot 53.1). After intermission, he had one point, missed six shots from the field, missed three free throws and didn’t have an assist.
Bishop Boswell went six-for-six on foul shots, scored 10 points and had eight more rebounds. JT Estrella had an off-night shooting (four of 13) but got eight rebounds.
Tennessee had a 46-31 edge in rebounding but Kentucky dominated offensively in the paint – 44 points to the Vols’ 22.
Tennessee had the lead for 34 minutes and 30 seconds. Kentucky edged ahead at 61-60 on an Otega Oweh layup with 6:10 remaining. Boswell and Ament reclaimed the advantage for the Vols.
Free throws by Denzel Aberdeen put UK up 68-67 with 1:27 to go. Ament answered. The decisive shot for the Wildcats was Collin Chandler’s three with 33 seconds left. The other clutch play for the winners was a rebound by Mouhamed Dioubate on a UK free-throw miss. That was one of Kentucky’s hustle plays.
“We had a big breakdown on the three,” Barnes said. “We over-rotated on the baseline … It wasn’t because of lack of effort … We really did a really good job of defending the three, better than we did last game. But that one play, we didn’t execute that last three the way we needed to.”
Coach Rick Barnes talks with the Tennessee Volunteers during the game Saturday at Kentucky.
The Vols bounced back from the previous loss to Kentucky. How will they respond this time?
Barnes said: “They’ll respond the same way. I can take this loss. The one in Knoxville, shoot, I wanted to – it took me two days to get over it, and I’ve been doing this a long time. I can normally let them go pretty quickly, but we just gift-wrapped that one.
“This one, this is exactly how we thought the game would go – even when we were up – you knew it was going to settle in and come down to a last-minute play.
“These guys will bounce back. They’ve got too much pride. They work too hard. We have not reached the ceiling with this team. We can keep growing.”
Maybe we’ll see on Wednesday. Tennessee plays at Mississippi State, 9 p.m. or later tipoff, ESPN2.
Marvin West welcomes comments or questions from readers. His address is marvinwest75@gmail.com
