Although Tennessee sophomore point guard Zakai Zeigler wound up racing away with this season's assist title in Southeastern Conference basketball, that isn't the element of his game that is being missed the most as the Volunteers turn the page to tournament time.
"Defensively, he's a menace," Vols senior guard Tyreke Key said in a news conference following Saturday afternoon's 79-70 loss at Auburn. "He's a huge loss for us. Everybody else has to step up."
Auburn scored 49 second-half points inside Neville Arena at Tennessee's expense, a staggering statistic given that the Tigers couldn't reach that figure for the entirety of last month's 46-43 loss in Knoxville. Even Auburn coach Bruce Pearl seemed a bit shell-shocked by the 79-point total against a team that entered the weekend as the nation's stingiest in field-goal percentage and 3-point goal percentage.
Of course, Pearl was quick to recognize that the Vols were missing their 5-foot-9, 171-pound first line of defense who just last week was announced as the SEC's only representative among the 10 Naismith Defensive Player of the Year semifinalists.
"I think the one area that Tennessee would point to where they missed Zeigler the most would be on the defensive end with his speed and quickness and ball pressure," Pearl said. "We anticipated how Tennessee would guard being really big, and we were able to get some good action."
The two highest scoring totals Tennessee has yielded this season were the 86 points to Missouri on Feb. 11, when Zeigler was limited by foul trouble before fouling out with 2:48 remaining, and at Auburn. Sure the Vols played quite well all the way around last Tuesday night, when Zeigler suffered his season-ending ACL injury within the first three minutes of a 75-57 whipping of Arkansas, but they head into this week's SEC tournament with their share of uncertainty.
Tennessee (22-9, 11-7) will open the 14-team event in Nashville as the fifth seed late Thursday afternoon against the winner of Wednesday night's matchup between 12th-seeded South Carolina (11-20, 4-14) and 13th-seeded Ole Miss (11-20, 3-15). Vols coach Rick Barnes felt before the trip to Auburn that his team had enough options as far as running the offense with Santiago Vescovi, Jahmai Mashack, Tyreke Key, B.J. Edwards and Josiah-Jordan James, and Saturday's outcome did not lessen that viewpoint.
"We were concerned that Santi might get in situations where he over-dribbled a little bit, but I thought he played as hard as he could possibly play," Barnes said. "I thought we really over-dribbled inside. I've said all year long that we're so much better when we're moving and cutting.
"We've got enough guys who can handle the ball and do what we need to do, but we'll always miss a guy like Zakai."
Zeigler averaged 10.7 points and 2.7 rebounds in 28.7 minutes per game this season, with his time on the floor trailing only that of Vescovi. His 161 assists and 59 steals led the squad, and he even tallied six blocked shots.
One aspect to every team that often gets exposed in March is free-throw shooting, and Zeigler connected on 83.3% of his attempts, while the Vols shot 70.8% overall.
"These next few days are extremely important," Key said. "From here on out, it is what it is."
Odds and ends
The only Vols who played in all 31 regular-season games were Mashack and Olivier Nkamhoua. ... Tennessee is still a No. 3 seed on ESPN's projected NCAA tournament bracket but slipped to a 4 seed on the CBS projection. ... Despite being 4-6 since the start of February, the Vols were third in the NET rankings Sunday behind Houston and Alabama.
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com.