Tennessee 12th-year basketball coach Rick Barnes has been seeking a solid defensive effort from his new-look Volunteers.
He got one Monday night.
The Vols awoke from another sluggish offensive start to clobber Radford 70-47 before 18,483 inside the Food City Center. Tennessee held the Highlanders to 26.2% shooting (16-of-61) and racked up a 43-32 edge in rebounding.
“Defensively, we guarded a really good basketball team the way we wanted to guard them,” Barnes said afterward on the Vol Network. “Offensively, we were terrible in terms of not executing what we’ve talked about. We’ve spent a long time trying to get better defensively with our communication and switching and all that, and we did a good job of that for the most part, but we just gave away too many turnovers.
“We’re so much better than what we’ve shown.”