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Rick Barnes thread


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The crazy thing is Tennessee is really experienced. It makes no sense why they would hit a wall. If it was a young team that just hadn't experienced a college season it might make sense. 

The only explanation I have is that Barnes is too big of a hard ass and his teams wear down at this point of the year. 

 

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2 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Eddie Reese literally mentored Barnes into chilling out as the season wore on.  Barnes listened, for about a week and a half.

Yeah, the reasons Barnes' teams wear down over the course of the season, regardless of experience of the roster, is pretty well documented from this time at Texas.

Nothing has changed. He just runs them into the wall and doesn't let up. 

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well another part of it is that he's pretty great at getting teams to play over their heads for the first several months of the season. this tennessee team has no nba players on it, and their best player is a 5'9" sophomore PG who nobody besides tennessee recruited. you look at that roster and it's a top 20-25 team with some good coaching. the fact that they were ever ranked as highly as 2 is way more surprising than the fact that they're struggling now. they still play great defense, but they have zero alpha players to lean on and are struggling with injuries. this collapse has been the most foreseeable of them all. 

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7472D854-69F0-4BFC-9068-259B3662D9B2.thumb.jpeg.d1eba19b6bc5b771e561a5a5b963dc07.jpeg

this is what they've looked like all year. great defense, no offense. and a reminder that a team's kenpom ranking is not where kenpom actually ranks each team, it's literally just the difference in your AdjD and AdjO. tennessee has not been good offensively for a couple of years now. add some injuries, and it's easy to see why a team like this would slide.

 

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nobody from this team will sniff the nba. this team just really isn't very talented, and as usual for barnes's teams, most of them are better athletes than hoopers. the fact that they started the year ranked #11 in the polls only set them up for failure. they were overrated from the jump.

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on kenpom, when one of your players ranks in the top 500 in the country in a statistical category they highlight that category in yellow. i'm going to post the rosters of the top 10 teams in kenpom, and you will see just what an outlier tennessee is here. this roster belongs nowhere near the top 10.

Spoiler

 

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this is why i feel bad for barnes, this season in particular. nobody ever stops to actually look at his team, they just look at where he was ranked, and where he's headed now. reminds me of the people here early this season who were posting that beard did a bad job last year because texas was supposed to be a top 2-3 team according to the preseason polls.

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Tennessee's offense is the weakest unit of any of the kenpom top 10:

4D4C4B6C-5FE9-4E07-B4E0-15353BB241DD.thumb.jpeg.f2e55c5e7170c81a6e9c3731e3506aee.jpeg

you add college PJ Tucker to this team and they have a legit bucket getter and go-to guy, and they're a S16 team. but yeesh. relying on Zeigler and Vescovi to carry the load every time out, they just can't do it. this team is the archetype of a Barnes team that disappoints fans- all athletes and bruisers, and the couple of actual hoopers have zero nba future. sigh. i hope you get it right one day Rick. 

edit- the other big takeaway from this graphic- the importance of defense. it's the common denominator when it comes to the most highly rated teams. we lost the best defensive coach in college basketball when we lost beard. the posts from this site since his firing show that a majority of our fans have absolutely no idea who we lost when we lost Beard. we lost three decades of success when we lost that idiot.

Edited by shadow_operative
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I still listen to one of the local sports-talk guys, Tony Basilio, from time to time.  The consensus is that they like Barnes but are extremely frustrated with a couple of things. 

0 fast break points yesterday.  I fell asleep as the producer was trying to see if they'd scored more than 100 fast break points all year in the SEC (18 games). 

Late season collapse.  The Vols went from #2 in the country to a tie for 6th place in the SEC.

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they objectively never should have no.2 in the country with this roster. their best player is a 5'9" sophomore guard who was ranked like 300 in his senior class and was recruited by nobody. they have no real shooters, and zero nba players. i don't j dee stand how anyone could look at this roster and think that they were ever actually closer being the no.2 team in the country than being the no.6 team in the sec. vols fans are somehow even worse than texas fans when it comes to not knowing what they're talking about + having unrealistic expectations. 

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They rose to #2 in the ranking because this same roster was winning games early in the season, beating Texas, KU and Kentucky. This is what happens with Rick Barnes led team more often than not. If he could get the same roster to win games in the first half of the season, why can't he get them to do the same in the second half? If he ever wants to make a deep tourney run, he needs to learn how to flip the script. I don’t think his late season woes has anything to do with the quality of the roster in a given year.

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2 hours ago, UTEE97 said:

They rose to #2 in the ranking because this same roster was winning games early in the season, beating Texas, KU and Kentucky. This is what happens with Rick Barnes led team more often than not. If he could get the same roster to win games in the first half of the season, why can't he get them to do the same in the second half? If he ever wants to make a deep tourney run, he needs to learn how to flip the script. I don’t think his late season woes has anything to do with the quality of the roster in a given year.

he overachieves with lesser talent and then regresses to the mean during conference play, along with a historical knack for wearing his teams down. his teams are in "midseason form" in november and december, and then depending on their talent level they may or may not fall off a cliff in february. last year with kennedy chandler, john fulkerson, and a fully healthy JJJ they never fell off. same as his teams with schofield, bone, and williams. same as his teams with TJ, same as his teams with PJ + LA, and again with DJA and Damion. the obvious and glaring exception to this being the 2009-10 team which barnes has absolutely zero excuse for falling off so badly with a team of such quality. i've said it before, but his early season overachieving with his lesser talented teams is often his own worst enemy.

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2 minutes ago, Braff Zacklin said:

Same.

Also: super surprised. Duke had been playing as well as anybody, and Tennessee sort of backed its way into a No.4 seed.

Duke played better on Thursday than anyone else I saw all day and I watched large parts of all the games. The job they did in dictating their will on that game and that Duke team was beautiful and classic Barnes at his best. 

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6 minutes ago, Wulaw Horn said:

Duke played better on Thursday than anyone else I saw all day and I watched large parts of all the games. The job they did in dictating their will on that game and that Duke team was beautiful and classic Barnes at his best. 

Yeah, I was thinking Duke had to be licking their chops after their performance and the Vo!s on Thursday, it's why they play the games I guess. 

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32 minutes ago, Wulaw Horn said:

Duke played better on Thursday than anyone else I saw all day and I watched large parts of all the games. The job they did in dictating their will on that game and that Duke team was beautiful and classic Barnes at his best. 

this game really was a prime example of why coaching matters. barnes had the perfect game plan and his players were ready to execute. holding that duke team to 52 is remarkable.

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Duke had 15 minutes during halftime to go from being freshmen to seasoned veterans. That's a big ask but it's what happens when you, almost literally, get punched multiple times during the first 20 minutes of the game and you have to grow up, quickly. Pretty sure Filipowski was concussed two minutes into the game after he took that shot. That set the tone for the game and Duke never recovered. Losing Mitchell before the game ever started was big as Duke already struggled from the perimeter and then Roach's foul trouble exacerbated things. 

At the end of the day Barnes won this game with a brilliant plan and I'm always happy when good things happen for him.

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think about where you were and what you were doing in 2008, the last time this program went to the sweet 16. now remember that rick barnes did this at Texas:

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and that lone round of 64 loss came in a season where we were 12-2 (the two losses by a combined three points to #27 iowa and #8 wake forest) and ranked in the top 10 before losing LA to injury and PJ to academic ineligibility. that's five S16's in seven years, probably 6/7 if we don't lose two future all american players halfway through the year.

i sincerely hope that this portion of our fanbase who still don't appreciate him, or worse, think he sucks, takes some time to realize how hard it is to go to the S16 just once, and then consider what Barnes did here at Texas and come to the realization that he was an outstanding coach for more than a decade here. the best coach we've ever had by a mile. almost all of my best memories of this program came during his time here.

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11 minutes ago, LTtxfan said:

So is this a thread where laughing at Barnes is allowed ??? 🤔

 

Asking for a friend... 😂😂😂😂😂😂

No.

We like Rick here.

Rick is good.

to be clear, if fake UT plays against real UT, I'll be rooting for barnes to choke like he was chris beard's girlfriend

but in all other scenarios ROCKY TOOOOOOOOOP

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