KNOXVILLE - Saturday's win against LSU may not be the last time Tennessee plays a basketball game without Kevin Punter Jr. this season.
The leading scorer for the Volunteers is dealing with a stress fracture in his right foot, leaving his status for the final four regular-season games and the Southeastern Conference tournament up in the air.
Tennessee coach Rick Barnes said Monday he doesn't expect Punter to play in Wednesday's game at South Carolina.
"It's day to day. We have no idea other than that," Barnes said at his weekly news conference.
"He's working. I saw him a little bit this morning, and he's doing his training and everything with (head trainer) Chad (Newman) and (strength coach) Garrett (Medenwald) - his rehabilitation and what he has to do with that. He was over in the gym this morning and had a boot on and said it was feeling a little bit better.
"It's still going to be day to day. I don't see him playing, certainly not Wednesday night, but I've been fooled before. We're just going to monitor it day by day."
Punter leads Tennessee with an average of 22.2 points per game, which ranks 11th nationally and second in the SEC behind Ole Miss guard Stefan Moody (22.8). The senior's current scoring average would be the 13th-best in program history, and he's in line to become just the third Vol, joining Ron Slay in 2003 and Chris Lofton in 2006, to average 20 points in a season since Allan Houston's senior season in 1993.
In 18 of 27 games this season Punter was Tennessee's leading scorer, and he's had 18 20-point games.
The injury apparently has been bothering him for a couple of weeks, but he didn't disclose it to anyone while playing through pain.
Barnes noticed it early in Thursday's loss at Kentucky when he took Punter out of the game earlier than in any other contest this season. Punter said after the game his ankle started bothering him during warmups. Two days later he watched from the bench while wearing a walking boot as Tennessee trounced LSU by 16.
"It is tough," Barnes said. "Looking back, I did not think he had been himself for the last three or four games. Actually at the start of the Kentucky game, if you go back, it's probably the first time all year I took him out with two minutes gone in the game. I asked him, 'What's going on? You don't look yourself.' He said, 'I'm all right, I'm all right.'
"He had actually told me the last couple of weeks his foot would hurt a little bit. It'd go away; a couple days (later) it'd come back. He said it really started bothering him in the warmups of the Kentucky game."
Punter has been one of the SEC's most improved players this season after averaging just 10.3 points in his first season with the Vols after transferring from junior college.
"I hurt for him, and we all do, because, first of all, he's just a great person," Barnes said. "He works hard. He's a great teammate. He's been a joy to be around, and you hope that he's going to have a way to maybe get back and work through it.
"But for him, it's tough on him, because he's a competitor, and he loves the game, and he's done everything a coaching staff could ask him to do. To see him in this situation this time of year, we all feel for him."
After games at South Carolina and at home against Arkansas this week, Tennessee closes the regular season with a visit to Vanderbilt and the home finale against Ole Miss before the SEC tournament in Nashville. The Vols will have to replicate how they played without Punter against LSU in those games if their best player again becomes a spectator.
"I don't think we surprised (LSU)," Barnes said. "In a situation like that, we didn't change really anything that we've done all year. We just told our team this is what they've worked for all year. Guys that haven't had the minutes, when you're called on you've got to be the next guy up to do your job.
"We didn't change a lot. We prepared the same way, and we didn't make a deal about it. It's a credit to our team that (we) showed some character."
Contact Patrick Brown at pbrown@timesfreepress.com.