Even a road game against its former coach couldn’t slow the Tennessee men’s basketball team’s momentum.
The Volunteers took control of Tuesday night’s game at Auburn with a 15-0 run midway through the first half that set up a fourth consecutive win, an 87-77 triumph against Bruce Pearl and the Tigers.
It was Tennessee’s second straight wire-to-wire win and its fourth road win of the season.
“I thought we were really good in the first half,” Tennessee coach Rick Barnes told the Vol Network after the game.
“We really rebounded the ball well in the first half. I thought that that was a big key. We got out and got a lot of extra possessions on the offensive end, too. From the 12-minute mark to the eight-minute mark we had a (15-0) run right there (to take a 17-point lead). That was probably the balance of the game.
“It was a really good win, but like I told these guys, we’ve got to continue to get better and there’s a lot of basketball left to be played.”
Admiral Schofield led Tennessee (13-9, 5-4 Southeastern Conference) with 18 points and seven rebounds, while Grant Williams scored 15 of his 17 points in the first half and fellow freshman Jordan Bowden accounted for four of the Vols’ 10 baskets in his 15-point second half.
Tennessee pushed its 16-point halftime lead to 22 on Bowden’s three-point play with 17:45 left, but after journeyman graduate transfer Lew Evans drained a 3-pointer with 11:55 left to make it 63-41, the Vols scuffled to the finish line.
Jordan Bone’s desperation 3 at the shot-clock buzzer gave the Vols a 73-56 lead with 5:36 left, but the only basket Tennessee made the rest of the game was Schofield’s cosmetic banked-in 3 inside the final 10 seconds.
Auburn (14-8, 3-6) cranked up the full-court pressure on Tennessee but still got no closer than eight points.
“Towards the end of the game we didn’t do a good job of closing,” Schofield told the Vol Network, “and that’s one of our weaknesses right now and it’s one of the things we’ve got to get better at.”
Tennessee shot just 35.7 percent in the second half and had as many turnovers (seven) as assists, but part of the struggles were due to the absence of Williams, who played just six minutes in the second half due to foul trouble.
“We did come out at halftime,” Barnes said. “We did a better job with that than we did in the last game, but then they started getting up and putting a little pressure on us, and I just didn’t think we handled it very well. We were fighting through foul trouble.
“We wanted Grant in the game, and Grant, I’m shocked when I looked at the stat sheet and he’s got 17 points in 18 minutes. I felt like he was a nonfactor at all in the second half. We need him in there, so we really didn’t get our offensive rhythm going the way we wanted to.”
Robert Hubbs III struggled on offense on a 2-of-12 shooting night, but he finished with 11 points after making seven of eight free throws and grabbed nine rebounds and handed out five assists.
Bone and Evans also played well in spurts, Kyle Alexander provided energy early in the game and Shembari Phillips and Kwe Parker came off the milk carton to chip in with quality minutes.
Barnes said he was “really proud” of Phillips, who played just five minutes against Kansas State on Saturday, and Parker, who played his most minutes (eight) in nearly a month after not getting off the bench against the Wildcats.
“That was two guys we’d been talking to for a couple weeks here,” he added, “where we felt like we just weren’t there and their spirit wasn’t what it needed to be. They want to play, and we’d be disappointed if they didn’t, but I thought their minutes in the first half were really good, and I thought Kwe in the second half did a lot of good things.”
Tennessee is 4-1 against Auburn since the Tigers hired Pearl in 2014, with the wins coming by eight, 26, 38 and 10 points.
“It’s my responsibility to get the kids to play hard,” Pearl told reporters after the loss. “Tennessee (and) South Carolina are the two hardest-playing teams in the league. They play harder than everybody. They played harder than us tonight.”
The Vols next play Saturday at Mississippi State, an 88-61 loser at Ole Miss on Tuesday. The rematch comes just two weeks after Tennessee beat the Bulldogs comfortably in Knoxville.
Contact Patrick Brown at pbrown@timesfreepress.com.