Mark WiedmerBut the path to this final loss of the year was something no one expected. Because the Vols didn't lose Wednesday night against awful Auburn and former UT coach Bruce Pearl. Nor did they lose Thursday afternoon to a Vanderbilt team that had thoroughly spanked them twice in the regular season.
Instead, despite playing their third game in less than 48 hours, despite their thin roster further taxed by foul trouble, the Vols led a Bayou Bengals bunch blessed with the projected overall No. 1 NBA draft pick with a mere 6:37 to play.
Read that again: With 6:37 to go against an LSU team playing its first SEC tourney game, a team blessed with freshman phenom Ben Simmons and at least a couple of other NBA prospects, Tennessee lost not so much because of an overall disparity in talent as because of an overwhelming disparity in minutes played.
Given all the Vols have been through the past two seasons - coaching changes, recruiting failures, the loss of high-scoring point guard Kevin Punter Jr. less than a month ago - first-year coach Rick Barnes may have done the best X&O job in the league, regardless of UT's final 15-19 record.
Yet it wasn't the strategy that should have made any and all Volniacs proud of their men's basketballers this day, however impressively Barnes outmaneuvered his LSU counterpart, Johnny Jones.
Instead, it was the intangible stuff - the heart, the toughness, the competitiveness, the refusal to admit that fatigue can get you beat.
"I'm pretty sore," said UT senior Armani Moore, who played 99 minutes in those 45.5 hours, finishing with six points, six rebounds and eight assists against LSU. "But that's not why we lost. We just made too many turnovers."
Senior Derek Reese echoed that assessment.
"I'm tired," he said, "but we got beat because we quit playing as well as we had the first two games."
No excuses. No complaints. No regrets.
"This was huge for the program," Reese said. "Huge to show what kind of fight we have. Huge to show that no matter what, we're not going to back down."
This is what every coach wants in his first year. He wants a foundation built on character and hard work and toughness. Barnes couldn't control the talent pool he inherited from the one-year blunder that was Donnie Tyndall. He couldn't control the loss of Punter, who averaged more than 22 points a game before being sidelined for the rest of the season a few weeks ago with a foot injury that required surgery.
It could also be argued that he couldn't control how his players received and embraced him. Anyone who knows of Barnes' coaching philosophy knows he isn't going to bend his principles. To succeed, they would have to bend to him.
"All the offseason work, all those suicides we ran," said freshman guard Shembari Phillips. "We've started a foundation of getting in the gym. If you'll work hard you'll see the benefits. It's like Coach has said all year, 'Hard work beats talent.' We've definitely proved that we can compete against anybody."
A year from now the roster will look vastly different. Moore and Punter and Reese will have moved on. Barnes will expect Robert Hubbs III and Detrick Mostella - who each scored 19 points against LSU - to bring such numbers regularly rather than once or twice a month. Phillips and Admiral Schofield (10 points, five rebounds) will also be a year older and wiser.
Or as Barnes noted afterward: "There's that word: consistency. But I do think we have a foundation in place moving forward that we can build on."
Mostella agreed, saying, "I think we'll be good next year."
Asked why, he smiled and said, "Coach told us after the game that we'd be back in this situation next year with a much better team."
No one who watched the Vols' three games over 45.5 hours inside Bridgestone Arena this week is likely to dispute that.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com