KNOXVILLE – Anyone familiar with Tennessee basketball watching the second half of the Volunteers’ eventual win at Mississippi State on Saturday knew what was coming.
Detrick Mostella, the mercurial sophomore guard, had scored eight points in a 1-minute, 39-second span midway through the second half when he led a break down the floor. The sequence was going to end only one way, in a heat-check 3-pointer.
Seconds after the ball clanged off the rim, Mostella was on the bench after a brief chat with Rick Barnes, his head coach.
“He (said) I shouldn’t have taken that shot at the time,” Mostella recalled Monday, two days after scoring a career-high 24 points in the 80-75 win. “He felt like I could have gotten a better one, or drive the ball at that time. I was like, ‘Yeah, Coach, you’re right about that. I shouldn’t have taken that, but I was feeling myself at the time.’
“He just started laughing and told me to go get a break.”
That sequence, in a nutshell, is Mostella.
“He does some funny things,” Barnes said. “We get on him watching tape a lot. There’s some funny things he does on the floor, but he’s trying and he’s starting to realize that he can affect the game without shooting the ball.”
The 6-foot-2 former four-star recruit with the unmistakable Alabama accent never met a shot he didn’t like, particularly when he’s feeling it.
And right now, Mostella is feeling it. Heading into tonight’s game against Vanderbilt he’s scored at least 10 points in seven of Tennessee’s last eight games. In that span he’s averaging 14 points per game and shooting 50 percent from the field.
In the last three games Mostella has hit a dozen 3s.
“We know that he can shoot the ball,” Barnes said. “He’s like any shooter. He can have games where he can get going, and other games he might not make as many, but what we’ve always tried to tell these guys from day one is how do you affect the game when you don’t have the ball in your hand. How can you affect it? Defensively is one way.”
This recent hot streak began shortly after Mostella encountered the second crossroads of his young career after playing just three minutes in the loss at Butler last month.
The first crossroads came when Donnie Tyndall, the coach for whom he came to Tennessee to play, was fired and replaced by Barnes after his freshman season. Mostella’s departure seemed like a foregone conclusion, but he wanted to stay at Tennessee and give Barnes a chance.
After all, he’d played at three different schools in Alabama, Indiana and Massachusetts in three years and committed to two programs (Oklahoma State and Pittsburgh) before he ever stepped foot on Tennessee’s campus.
“When we first got here we weren’t sure where he would fall into everything,” Barnes said. “I think he’s matured with his teammates as much as anything. A year ago he’d be the first to tell you he felt like he wasn’t a part of it, and it was all because of his attitude and thinking it was just going to be easy and he’s supposed to walk in here.
“What a lot of young guys believe (is) there’s a sense of entitlement, but he found out a year ago it wasn’t like that. He stayed. When we got here, like a lot of guys, he could have left. He said to me, ‘I want to do this.’
“It hasn’t been easy for him. I’m tough on him, now. He’s really tried. The first thing he’s done is he’s done a great job with his teammates. They’ve seen a change in him, and I think it begins there.”
With Mostella there’s no way of knowing when or if it will stop.
“Back when I was in a hole, Coach was talking about in the locker room (that) there’s a lot of people our team stealing money,” Mostella said. “I started thinking, ‘Am I stealing money?’ He’s saying when we’re on scholarship, we should do things much harder.
“I started questioning myself and questioning myself, so I asked him one day and he was like, ‘You’ve been stealing money a little bit.’ It just gave me the opportunity to take it to another level. I felt like I’ve done that the last couple of games.”
Contact Patrick Brown at pbrown@timesfreepress.com.