Tennessee basketball: Five most important Vols for 2019-2020

Rick Barnes has to rely on lots of new talent for the 2019-20 Tennessee basketball season. Here are the five best Volunteers for this year.

Four starters are gone, all in the NBA, and Rick Barnes is starting all over with Tennessee basketball. Where does he stand with his new team, and who’s now going to step up to lead the Vols after so much attrition?

Over the last two years, Grant Williams was easily the go-to player on the team. Admiral Schofield was the wing and the leader. Jordan Bone was the point guard. Kyle Alexander did the dirty work under the basket. They were easily the four most important players in the program last year, so UT has a gigantic task ahead of them.

How are they going to do it? Well, they took another blow with the news that Uros Plavsic, a seven-foot transfer from the Arizona State Sun Devils, would not get an eligibility waiver from the NCAA this year.

As a result, Tennessee basketball is limited in the players it can turn to. And that is the focus of this post, which is simply going to do a countdown of the best ones on the team this year. Of course this is a projection.

But we based this projection on development, reliability at their position and how key they will be at that position. It’s much more simple than toughest Vols to replace or newcomers set to make the biggest impact. This post goes straight to the point.

Without Plavsic, Barnes has a collection of four new freshmen to pick from, two returning leading scorers, one guy back from injury, two walk-ons and three other returning contributors from last year. That’s a decent collection of guys, but he’s got a lot of work to find out the top people he’ll be able to rely on.

We’re going to try to do our best to break that down here. Let’s see what Barnes can do with so much talent gone from last year. These are the five most important Vols to the 2019-2020 Tennessee basketball season.