Retour
Tuesday night, No. 8 Tennessee men's basketball opened the 2026-27 season with a 90-59 win over the Wofford Terriers. The Volunteers used a strong second-half effort to pull away after they finally settled in and attacked. Sophomore forward DeWayne Brown II finished with a 17-point, 17 rebound double double. Junior Guard Terrence Hill Jr., added 17 points also.
After the game, head coach Rick Barnes spoke with the media. Below is everything he had to say.
“We were playing a good basketball team, and they run good stuff. They’re well coached and they’ve got some quickness. They have some size. And we knew that we’d have to guard. And I do think from our point of view we had some guys a little bit uptight, which you would expect. But when we had a chance to maybe get a little bit more separation, we had some breakdowns defensively and really scout report breakdowns. And they’re a good basketball team.
“Second half, I just thought that we got out and played more sort of wide open. I thought when Terrence came in the game he started getting the ball, even though he didn’t shoot it well. He got the ball in the gut of that defense and some good things started happening. DeWayne Brown, 17 and 17, by far his best game. DeWayne has struggled up to this point in our exhibition season, but I thought he was terrific tonight.
“And Juke, we started again. I told people I’m not concerned about starting lineups. I’m more concerned about how we finish games. But Juke started the second half, and I thought played great. He was a plus 29 in the game, which I thought was really good. I thought defensively he really, really worked hard, and that’s what we’re still trying to get, that mentality defensively where we can guard. We started rebounding the ball. We went at it with a lot more force in the second half.
“But overall there were some good moments for everyone. Tyler, certainly when he was in the Davidson scrimmage, that was his first time out and he had a calming effect on everybody, and I thought he did that tonight. But once we got out and got stops and rebounded, things started working. And that’s what it takes. I’d like to see us have more offensive rebounds. Tonight we shot 52%, so there obviously weren’t as many offensive rebounds.
But overall, after we got settled in, it was the kind of game we expected. We didn’t think we were going to come out here and beat Wofford by 30 points in the first half because they’re too well coached and they’ve got good players. But we stayed with it and we got better as the game went on.”
“I think Juke is in a situation a lot like Nate was, probably more so, because I don’t know if anybody expected as much from Dalton and Chaz, as much. But when you’re talked about as much as those guys were, and they’re competitive, they want to do well. And I think sometimes they put pressure on themselves. I told him, ‘You’re starting the second half. I just want to see you let it go. Just play, man. Just play. Take your shots.’
“He’s working so hard to try to be a good teammate. He’s turned down shots that he needs to take. I thought he did a good job of driving the ball hard, because that’s something we know he can do because he’s so strong. And he likes to pass the ball. But there’s no doubt he’s competitive and he wants to do well. He doesn’t want to let anybody down. And he’s learning a whole new style defensively. In the second half, I thought his defense, it’s great to get it on tape, because he looked like a defensive guy in the second half. He really was fighting to get through screens and doing some things that we need him to do. He needed to do it, and he went out and did it.
“I just told him, ‘Just play, man. You’re a good basketball player. Just play.’ I just felt like, for whatever reason, looking at him in the first half, he had the weight of the world on him. And he’s a really good basketball player and he’s just got to let it go. And I thought in the second half he did. He probably played as long a stretch as anybody tonight.”
“Yeah, I wanted him to go. I asked him during the timeout, I said, ‘Are you tired?’ And he was tired. He said, ‘Let me see if I can get through this.’ Because we’re asking him to do a lot. We’re not just wanting him to be an offensive player, because he is not a selfish offensive player. Like I said, he likes to pass the ball. He really does. Second half, how many rebounds he have? Four? So he played a total of how many minutes tonight? Twenty six.
“His rebounding will go up. He’s always been a good rebounder, and he’s just versatile. But we’re asking all these guys to do something at a level they’ve never done it, to be honest with you, and that’s have a defensive mindset first. And we believe that if they get that, rebound, take care of the ball, the offense will just flow for them because they are good offensive players. It's not just Juke, as a group.
“And that’s not just this team. That’s every team. I could go back and show you our early games last year, and it took us a while to get going a year ago. It took Jacoby a while. It took Felix a while. Everybody. But tonight, the second half is what we’ve been looking for. We’ve had some good practices, but now it’s about consistency. It’s still about finding a rhythm with certain guys. We think we’ve got depth that we can use. But the key will be, once we use these guys at the level we’d like to use them, we can’t break that flow.
“From the beginning, we haven’t had a chance to put a team together because of guys in and out of practice with injuries, and just trying to get them to understand the basic things that we think it takes to win games. And the buy in certainly got better after the Duke game, because there was not a buy in prior to that. It kind of showed itself in the second half of the Duke game. We just reverted to thinking we’re going to shoot the ball, whoever had it. But after that we came back and had a couple really good days of practice before Davidson, and we actually looked like a good basketball team against Davidson.”
“I told them, and I mean this when I say this, I’m not really concerned about who starts. I told them the other day, we will determine who starts. That's important by film. Film will determine that for us. But really, in the end, I just decided to start the way we went the last game, because I liked the way we got off to a good start against Davidson. That was the only reason I went that way tonight, knowing that we were going to change the lineup in the second half. We knew we were going to start something different in the second half, and we’ll still play with it and see what’s right for everybody.”
“He's smart. DeWayne’s smart, but he needs our guards to get him the ball at the right time, right place. And DeWayne he struggled. But I think he would tell you some of the reasons he struggled. I watched him in practice fumble the ball and do some things that are certainly not who he is. And you can tell he’s playing so quick, before he’s getting the ball, he’s taking his eyes off of it. And some of that has to do with we’re not as bulky as we were a year ago, but we’re quicker. And I think he understands he’s got to catch and play quick because we do recover a little bit quicker.
“But he deserves it. DeWayne puts in more time and works as hard as any player we’ve had here, and we need him to do what he did. He’s not going to do that every night. I wish he would. But I thought Miles in the second half started going to get the ball, got more aggressive. Same thing with Jalen Haralson. Everybody, you saw a glimpse of what they can be. And now it’s about putting it all together.”
“First of all, DeWayne Brown is a really good basketball player. I’ve said before, when we bring recruits in and show them highlights of what we’re trying to get done, it’s amazing. DeWayne’s in almost all those highlights from last year. Certainly a different role this year. Expectations go up for him.
“I think Tyler helped him early in the Davidson game, because Tyler did bring a sense of calmness to the court when he played. DeWayne is becoming much more vocal, and we need that from him. And that’s a little bit out of his personality. But I thought Troy was really good too. Troy and DeWayne do have a grasp of it. Troy, as you know, had the offseason surgery and got banged up with the other one, and we’ve got to be very cautious with him.
“Our guard depth is what we want it to be, and we’ve just got to find a way to utilize it where everybody understands that the strength is in the numbers with this team. And I hope each guy can continue to grow and realize that, just be great teammates, not be a weak link in that chain. And when my time comes, I want to be ready.”
“I told him I like that better than the threes. You’ll eventually make threes. We need to attack, put pressure on the rim, and you can do that in a variety of ways. But we need that out of him. And he’s slippery. He would tell you that he would rather make six threes, and I told him, ‘Hey, that’s what you do and you can do it.’ We’ve seen him make six in a row. But tonight, attacking the lane the way he did, he’s got great touch in there and he’s got great vision. And once he decides that he wants to be a two way player, he’ll be as good as any guard in the country. Once he decides he wants to do that. It’s up to him.”
“It is. I’ve told our team we should want to lead the nation in free throw attempts, but we’ve got to get there first. And we’re not going to get there if we just stand and shoot threes like we did in our first two exhibition games. We didn’t do that in the Davidson game. We’ve got to move the ball and attack. I don’t want guys turning down shots, but I want them to understand the flow of the game, what’s going on within the game. But we need to get fouled. We need to get to the free throw line, and especially with the right guys at the right time.”
“Some of that was obviously our guards getting in there deep too. But we knew coming in that Wofford had a couple of big guys that we’d have to deal with. I love their frontline guys. They’re aggressive, rugged, play with just a real force. And we knew they were going to try to bump us back down. But we’re trying to get all of our guys to do that, not just our post guys. We’re trying to get our guards in there to create some situations.
“But overall, you go back to the exhibition games, we didn’t do anything in the lane. It was all hit or miss from the perimeter. But tonight we did some things to give us a chance to rebound the ball better. And once we got stops, we got out in the open court. We have some speed coming down the court, and when we get into our actions quicker, we’re a much better basketball team.”
“We’ve played really hard against each other in practice, but against outside competition, no question. We’ve got some things on there that show how we want to play. And these guys need to see it, because we always talk about what we expect with our program, but they’ve never lived it. It’s all new to them. We’ve got 13 new guys.
“And regardless of what outside people thought about how we were going to play against Xavier, Duke, whatever, if we had our preference, we would have probably scrimmaged Davidson earlier, because they would have exposed us drastically, as they always do. But it didn’t work out like that. I said it to them tonight. I said the last time people saw us play, at Duke, that’s who we were. And tonight you got a chance to change that narrative.
Because at Duke, they beat us any and every way, and we certainly helped them. But I said we’ve got to decide who this team is going to be. And I thought in the second half we got more to it. I do think our depth had a conditioning factor at the end of the game. If you go back to all of our teams, we’ve always been able to do that when we’ve been really good.”
“Miles is a shot blocker. It's just him understanding. All of these guys. And all we’re asking these guys to do is get out of their comfort zone and go further than you’ve ever gone before. And it’s really hard to do. But Miles is one guy that paces himself too much. He’s got so much more, and he could be so much more dominant. He’s quick, he’s got good hands, he can score the ball. But it’s a matter of understanding he can play a lot harder. And when he does that, he looks like a totally different basketball player.
“He needs to understand when he thinks he’s tired, he’s really not. Because I can tell you, after a two and a half hour practice, I’ve told him, ‘You’re going to run four 17 drills,’ and we’ll tell him, ‘If you can make one in 18, we’ll count it as two.’ And he does it every time. To prove my point to him that he’s holding back. And he doesn’t need to hold back, especially with this group and the depth we have. No one needs to hold back. They need to go all out for whether it’s two and a half, three minutes, three and a half, four, whatever it may be. And then you start seeing some real jumps and real improvement.”
“Well, not really. But we want him to shoot the ball. I think he’s as good a shooter as there is out there. Tyler’s smart and he knows how to play. He was a huge difference in the Davidson game. He had 19 points in that game. But we want him to drive. Tyler can play in there too. He can drive it, he can pass it. But when he gets going, he can get going with the best of them, and he knows it.
“Certain guys, when they see daylight, we want them to shoot it. There’s no question about it. But we want to play winning basketball. And I can tell you one thing about Tyler, he wants to win at a high level. He’s an excellent on the floor coach. He talks. I think he’s helped DeWayne a lot. Those two guys seem to be the most vocal guys. I thought Terrence Hill tonight had a voice. And the more we get that, the better chance you have to be the team you want to be.”
Send your questions, comments, and hot takes to our email tennesseeonsi@gmail.com for the chance to be featured in an article!
Sign up for our newsletter to have articles sent straight to your email daily HERE.
Retour
Top
| Politique de confidentialité Conditions d'utilisation Contact |
Actualiser
|
All the best breaking news stories from Apex Scores Lite. Optimised for feature phones and low end Android devices, Apex Scores Lite helps users with legacy devices and poor network connectivity access the latest football news and live scores. Particularly relevant for breaking football news in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa.