Tennessee basketball wins at Georgia with impressive second half: Three takeaways
A sluggish first half generated some concern that Tennessee basketball would blow a very real chance at the SEC Regular Season Championship Wednesday with a bad loss. However, the Vols stayed alive in the race and beat the Georgia Bulldogs 75-68 to finish 5-4 in SEC play on the road in the regular season.
Rick Barnes’ team, ranked No. 13 in both polls, was actually trailing 24-18 at one point and went into halftime tied at 35. In the second half, trailing 44-43 with under 16 minutes to go, UT went on an 11-0 run and eventually extended their lead to 15. UGA cut it to four with a 9-0 run but got no closer after that.
Rocky Top improves to 22-7 and 13-4 in the SEC with a visit from the Arkansas Razorbacks set for Saturday in a rematch for their final regular season game. Tom Crean’s Dawgs fall to 6-24 and 1-16 in SEC play and will visit the Missouri Tigers Saturday. Here are three things we learned from Tennessee basketball’s victory.
1. Josiah-Jordan James stole the show.
It’s pretty simple actually. Josiah-Jordan James, who had returned to a bit of a slump the past two weeks, got red-hot again shooting the ball. He led the team in scoring with 23 points while shooting 3-of-7 from the three-point line. All three of those made three-pointers were during UT’s 11-0 run to put them in control.
What makes James so dangerous when he’s on, though, is how effective he is everywhere else, making him almost unbeatable. That was on display in this game, as he also had two steals, five assists, eight rebonds and no turnovers. Two of those assists were to John Fulkerson after the Vols let Georgia cut it to four and needed to take control again. That leads to our next point
2. Georgia was no match for the Vols’ bigs.
If you base the postgame of Tennessee basketball on what happened Tuesday, then John Fulkerson is fully healthy, Uros Plavsic has turned a corner and Brandon Huntley-Hatfield and Jonas Aidoo, while raw, continue to develop. However, there is a question as to that legitimacy given UGA’s weaknesses inside.
Still, UT outrebounded the Dawgs 39-28 with 12 offensive boards. They also had seven blocks. Huntley-Hatfield, James and Fulkerson each had two. Plavsic had one but added 10 boards. Fulkerson, meanwhile, had 12 points, including two crucial buckets when UT was only up 64-60. That became the difference.
3. Guards were productive but inconsistent.
Kennedy Chandler had 16 points and four steals while shooting 2-of-5 from three. Santiago Vescovi went 3-of-8 from three and had 11 points. However, overall, the primary ball-handlers did not do a great job of taking care of the ball in this game, and it proved costly. Chandler had four turnovers, and Vescovi had two.
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Meanwhile, Zakai Zeigler had two turnovers and just two points off the bench. Now, Zeigler has an excuse, as we found out his family lost everything in a fire recently. That played a role in this, and we’ll have more on how to help him later. For this game, though, Tennessee basketball’s guards had nine turnovers, and that made things tougher than it should have been.