Tennessee’s Kyle Alexander (11) and Iowa’s Joe Wieskamp (10) battle for a rebound in the second half during a second-round men’s college basketball game in the NCAA Tournament, Sunday, March 24, 2019, in Columbus, Ohio. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)LOUISVILLE, Ky. – If you doubt that Tennessee needs senior center Kyle Alexander to be at his best come Thursday’s Sweet 16 matchup against Purdue inside the posh KFC Yum! Center, consider his contributions to the last meeting between the two a year ago in the Bahamas.
In that late autumn matchup from the 2017-18 season, Alexander scored 13 points, hauled in 11 rebounds and made off with two steals in 29 minutes. The Boilermaker he’ll be most often matched up against Thursday – 7-foot-3 sophomore Matt Haarms – scored all of two points in 21 minutes.
Oh, yeah, the Vols won that one in overtime.
“Kyle is a huge part of our team,” junior point guard Jordan Bone said Wednesday. “He’s our best defender inside and he causes opposing guards to take tough shots. It’s like Admiral (Schofield) told the coaches before the overtime game against Iowa, ‘We need Kyle to make plays.'”
Alexander’s father, Joseph, who scored 1,200 career points while starring for Niagara in the 1980s, thought Kyle needed to consider basketball as a sport after he grew to 6-6 prior to his junior year at Orangeville Prep in Canada.
“I was playing (the video game) Call of Duty with my friends,” Alexander recalled during the Vols’ NCAA tourney media session Wednesday. “My dad came in and said, ‘You’re 6-6 and you can run. I won’t force you to play, but you should try it.'”
Alexander tried it. He wasn’t an instant success.
“The first day I went out for a team, I couldn’t even do a left-handed layup,” Alexander recalled. “They had to teach me footwork for over an hour.”
He didn’t give up, however. He fell in with a group of gifted Canadian hoopsters that included former Kentucky star and current Denver Nuggets guard Jamal Murray.
“Jamal’s still one of my best friends,” Alexander said. “We group chat all the time.”
Tennessee assistant Rob Lanier began chatting with Alexander while he was in a similar position at Texas under then-Longhorns coach Rick Barnes. He loved both Alexander’s athletic potential and his character away from the court. The plan was to sign Alexander, then redshirt him. But then Texas parted ways with Barnes, Tennessee hired him and the long, tall Canadian, having grown to 6-9, decided to follow Barnes and Lanier to Knoxville.
“Obviously, at Tennessee, we told him that the role changes and he’s going to have to come in and play,” said Barnes. “I think Kyle’s started every game. If not, he’s close to it.”
Alexander started 11 of 32 games as a freshman, 23 of 32 as a sophomore, and all 70 of the games the Vols have played to date the past two seasons.
“I’ve said before, I wish we could have redshirted him at Tennessee, because I know his best basketball is ahead of him,” Barnes added of Alexander, who now stands 6-11. “Physically, once he continues to get the weight he needs on him, he’ll be one of those in a couple of years that people are going to say, ‘Wow, this guy’s really come into his own.”
How far has the Milton, Ontario, Canada native come?
“Coach Lanier used to have video of a baby giraffe being born, wobbling and falling all over the place,” recalled Barnes. “That was Kyle Alexander.”
Yet from the beginning, Lanier also knew Alexander was a person whose character was anything but falling all over the place.
“We knew that going forward, when we brought other kids to campus, we wanted them to meet Kyle,” Lanier told the Knoxville News Sentinel earlier this month. “We wanted them to know that character-wise, this is what we are going to be about. These are the kind of young people you are going to be around. (Kyle) was the first building block.”
Four years later, the wisdom of that mindset is unbreakable. It was Alexander who hosted two-time Southeastern Conference player of the Year Grant Williams on his visit. It was also Alexander who hosted point guard Jordan Bone on his visit.
“Kyle’s a team guy,” said junior guard Jordan Bowden, who was baptized with Alexander last year. “Kyle’s always positive, always helpful. And on the court, he’s always there defensively. He’s blocking shots, making steals. He certainly fixes a lot of things that go wrong on defense.”
A lot could go wrong on defense Thursday if the Vols can’t slow down Purdue guard Carsen Edwards, who scored 42 points on Saturday against Villanova. But Bone, among others, believes the presence of Alexander on both offense and defense should do much to advance the Big Orange past the Boilermakers and on to the Elite Eight.
“When Kyle’s playing good,” said Bone, “we feel there’s nobody that can beat us.”
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com