KNOXVILLE — Despite finishing the regular season with a disappointing home loss to South Carolina on Saturday, the Tennessee men’s basketball team got the Southeastern Conference tournament draw it might have preferred.
The Volunteers avoided a bottom-four record that would have put them in one of two Wednesday night games, missed a first-round matchup against a full-strength Florida team that beat them by 17 points a week ago and wound up on the opposite side of the bracket from No. 1 and 31-0 Kentucky.
Their reward is a rubber match with the hottest team in the conference not wearing blue and white.
Tenth-seeded Tennessee will play seventh-seeded Vanderbilt, which notched its eighth win in 10 games with a comfortable victory at Ole Miss on Saturday night, at 7 p.m. EDT Thursday at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena.
“The SEC tournament’s win or go home. That’s enough,” Vols guard Josh Richardson said after Saturday’s 60-49 loss to the Gamecocks. “I don’t think we should have to be looking at the NIT, the NCAA tournament or none of that. I think we should just be (thinking) the SEC tournament’s win or go home.
“I just want to see everybody play as hard as we can for every game we play out there,” he added. “I’d be satisfied with that. Just go out there and leave everything there, because I think we’ve had some games we didn’t leave everything on the court.”
The two in-state rivals have played each other 187 times dating back to 1922, but this will be the first matchup since 1987 between the Vols and Commodores in the SEC tournament, which isn’t surprising given the divisional format the league used for nearly two decades. Tennessee has not won the tournament in 35 years but has won seven of its eight tournament meetings with Vanderbilt.
“It’s going to be an intense rivalry game again for the third time, and we’re going to be ready,” Tennessee guard Robert Hubbs said.
The Vols and Commodores already played two such games this season.
The Feb. 11 meeting in Nashville featured 15 lead changes and seven ties. Trailing by five with 15 seconds left, Tennessee took advantage of some missed free throws and Vanderbilt’s decision to foul, up three points, too soon to force overtime when Hubbs banked in the tying shot at the buzzer. The Vols then won 76-73 in overtime.
Leading by 13 points early in the second half of the rematch in Knoxville 15 days later, Tennessee was headed toward its fifth season sweep of Vanderbilt in the last 10 seasons when the Commodores caught fire. Led by Luke Kornet’s 18 second-half points, Vanderbilt shot 16-of-19 overall and 9-of-11 on 3-pointers and scored 54 second-half points in a 73-65 win.
“Obviously it’s a heck of a team we’ve had two great games with,” first-year Vols coach Donnie Tyndall said. “As I’ve said each of the other two times, that’s a quality team that’s well-coached. The second game, the second half they really spaced the floor and did a great job of moving the ball and making 3s.
“We certainly know it’ll be a tough game regardless. We have a ton of respect for them.”
Leading up to the second meeting, Wade Baldwin, Vanderbilt’s freshman point guard, took exception to Richardson’s seemingly innocuous comment after Tennessee’s overtime win that the Vols “out-toughed” the Commodores.
At the end of the rematch, Baldwin clapped in the direction of Tennessee forward Armani Moore, which prompted Vanderbilt coach Kevin Stallings to yell at his player. ESPN cameras picked up the expletive he used in pulling Baldwin out of the postgame handshake line, making him find Moore and apologize and berating him for his actions.
Baldwin posted on his Twitter account after the game that he “felt no offense” from the whole thing, though Stallings issued an apology the next day.
Richardson had a similar take on the whole situation.
“You know how that happens. Some stuff happens and everybody wants to blow it up,” he said. “Wade’s a good player, Armani’s a good player, I’m a good player. When good players get competitive, we get to jawing some times. It happens.”
Tennessee has been one-and-done in the SEC tournament just once in the last seven years, and a first early exit since 2012 would send the Vols to their first losing season since 2004-05.
“You never know what can happen in March,” Richardson said. “The SEC tournament’s a place where teams can come out of nowhere and win it. If we go down there with the right mindset, I think we should be able to go get a couple.”
Contact Patrick Brown at pbrown@timesfreepress.com.