Rick Barnes Knows UK Isn’t the Same Team it Was in Early February

Vicky Graff Photo

Do not expect a letdown from No. 4 Tennessee when it hosts Kentucky this afternoon even though the Vols clinched the Southeastern Conference title with a win at South Carolina earlier this week.

Tennessee (24-6, 14-3 SEC) is in position to claim a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament for the first time and a second win over Kentucky (22-8, 12-5) would certainly enhance the Vols’ NCAA resume. Tennessee beat the Wildcats 103-92 in Lexington on Feb. 3.

Tennessee coach Rick Barnes and UK coach John Calipari are big-time friends and once again Barnes was extremely complimentary about UK going into today’s game.

“We have great respect for Kentucky. I think they’re the most explosive offensive team in the country. And John  does what he always does and gets his guys playing great basketball at the end of the year and they just keep building,” Barnes said.

“They have been on a little bit of a roll themselves. It doesn’t take much to get our guys’ attention because of the respect that they have for Kentucky and their program. So we know that we’re going to have to be ready to play.”

Barnes knows this is a different Kentucky team from the one Tennessee owned just over a month ago. Kentucky is on a four-game win streak for the first time in SEC play this year and has won six of its last seven.

“Justin Edwards has become more of a part of it. D.J. Wagner didn’t play up there, so they’ve got different guys. And I think they’ve all improved,” Barnes said. “We saw what Rob Dillingham did against us, but Reed Shepherd, those guys are all improved and they’ve got a lot of guys that can make difficult shots and go get their own shots.

“But again, it’s what John does. His teams always get better. They always do. And he had a lot of young guys work into it and he’s done exactly what all of us that know him would expect him to do.”

It will be Senior Day at Tennessee and Barnes struggled to explain what Josiah-Jordan James and Santiago Vescovi have meant to his program.

“I can’t put it into words because we’d be here all night, because I could talk about each one of them for hours on hours. Because from the time they got here, we were really in a transition period, and those guys were young and growing up, but they’re the ones that over the last (five years), they’ve been the rock, both of them,” Barnes said.

“Josiah and Santi, I mean been the rock, they’ve been the foundation, they’ve been the ones that know us. They know the coaches better than anybody. They know our standard. They know everything that we want done here. And so they’re a voice not only to their teammates, but a voice that, from the coaching staff standpoint, that you listen to.”