‘Disappointing’ defeat: Vols flattened by Vanderbilt

KNOXVILLE — A snowy day in Knoxville ended with Vanderbilt raining 3-pointers on Tennessee.

It became a night the Volunteers would likely to forget very quickly.

The Commodores hit 10 treys in the first half alone and finished with a season-high 13 in rolling to a 88-74 Southeastern Conference road victory against Tennessee at Thompson-Boling Arena on Wednesday night.

“It was very disappointing,” Tennessee’s Robert Hubbs III said after scoring 10 points. “We step across those lines, and we weren’t ready to play tonight. They executed on offense and defense, and we didn’t do none of those. We didn’t match their intensity or anything. We just didn’t come to play tonight.”

It was Tennessee’s worst loss this season, and it came in front of a small crowd impacted by the weather conditions and the 9 p.m. start time.

The two in-state rivals entered the game with identical conference records, but the game more reflected the league’s preseason poll, where Vanderbilt was picked second and Tennessee 13th.

“That’s what we played like,” said first-year Tennessee coach Rick Barnes. “We came out and didn’t do very much of anything of what we had talked about it. Even in the second half, we never really were able to put any real game pressure on them.

“We didn’t give ourselves a chances, not to take anything away from Vanderbilt, because they present problems for us.”

Tennessee (9-9, 2-4 SEC) faced its largest halftime deficit of the season (21 points) after Vanderbilt caught fire from distance after a slow start.

Vanderbilt hit just one of its first seven 3-point attempts before connecting on seven of its next 10 to turn a 17-12 lead into a 15-point advantage with a 14-4 run over a three-minute, 36-second span.

Matthew Fisher-Davis came off the bench to six five 3s, and Camron Justice, who committed to Tennessee just before Cuonzo Martin’s third season as coach in 2013, hit three straight during Vanderbilt’s run.

The carnage ended with Vanderbilt hitting as many 3s as Tennessee made shots, and the Vols didn’t hit a 3 until the 8:04 mark of the second half after nine misses.

“Going in we knew they could shoot,” said guard Kevin Punter Jr., who led the Vols with 26 points. “Pretty much every last one of them can shoot the ball, so if you give them time and space, I mean, in this league if you give anyone time and space, they’re going to most likely make you pay.

“We knew Vanderbilt, coming in, those guys can shoot the ball. We didn’t get there quick enough.”

In the first half the Vols shot 30 percent and had six shots blocked and multiple others altered by Vanderbilt’s trio of 7-footers.

“A lot of things,” Barnes said when asked what he told the team at halftime. “You break it down to them, but the fact is we just didn’t do anything we talked about. I didn’t think we played with the kind of energy (we needed).

“I thought we played like a team, too, like we had a nice win Saturday (at Mississippi State) that it’s like, ‘OK, it’s just going to be easy.’ It’s never going to be easy for us. I thought we were very immature.

“They beat us, and we deserved it. The way it was, we deserved it, because we didn’t give ourselves a chance.”

Armani Moore returned from a one-game absence due to an ankle injury and scored 14 points, but Tennessee players not named Kevin Punter, who was 9-of-20 from the field, shot less than 30 percent.

Wade Baldwin IV led Vanderbilt (11-7, 3-3) with a career-high 25 points, Fisher-Davis added 18 and Justice chipped in 12.

Vanderbilt’s largest lead was 28 points (55-27) at the 16:50 mark, and the lead stayed at more than 20 points until Detrick Mostella hit a 3 that made 74-57 with 6:05 to play.

Tennessee produced second half fightbacks against Butler and Gonzaga, but Wednesday’s second half was a formality, albeit a bogged-down affair that featured 37 fouls and 56 free throws.

Barnes said this loss reminded him of his team’s loss to Nebraska in Brooklyn in late November.

“We didn’t put up a fight in that game, and I didn’t think we put up a fight tonight,” he said. “When we got down, whether it was at Butler or Gonzaga, I thought we showed some fight, showed some pride. I didn’t think we had any of that tonight.”

Punter conceded that it’s tough for a player to hear those words from his coach.

“Yeah, for the simple fact that you don’t ever want your coach to think his team has no fight,” he said. “I kind of felt that, too. We weren’t fighting enough for him, and for each other.”

Contact Patrick Brown at pbrown@timesfreepress.com.