Gameday on Rocky Top

From a recruiting rankings standpoint, Tennessee’s 2021 basketball team might be the most talented in program history. It’s the only Vol squad of the recruiting rankings era to feature three five-stars (Keon Johnson, Jaden Springer, and Josiah-Jordan James), and now two of them have departed for the NBA Draft as one-and-done players. And on the back end, the draft itself should validate that talent: Keon Johnson is routinely projected as a lottery pick, with Jaden Springer sprinkled throughout the first round. If that unfolds, it’ll be only the second time in school history the Vols had two players taken in the first round of the same draft, following Ernie & Bernie. And Bernard King (7th) is one of just three Vols to ever be drafted in the Top 10, along with Tom Boerwinkle (4th) and Dale Ellis (9th). There’s a lot of history to be made in a few months.

So when we take all that and try to figure out how this team lost as a five seed in the first round of the NCAA Tournament…you get the frustration. But when I started researching how far one-and-dones typically advance in the dance, it turns out the 2021 Vols are a more common tale than you might think.

The one-and-done rule has been in place for 15 seasons now, requiring high school seniors to play at least one year before becoming eligible for the draft. That first year in 2006 was a transitional time: Shawne Williams from Memphis was taken 17th overall, the only true freshman one-and-done of the draft. But the floodgates opened the following season: Greg Oden and Kevin Durant became the poster children for one-and-dones at the top of the NBA Draft, as eight of the first 21 players selected in the 2007 draft were college freshmen. And it’s gone about that way ever since.

Durant is sometimes used in protest against Rick Barnes: the 2007 Longhorns were 24-9 on Selection Sunday, earned a four seed, and were emphatically bounced in the second round by five-seed USC. “Couldn’t make the Final Four with Kevin Durant!”, etc.

Turns out, making the Final Four with one-and-dones is really hard to do, unless you’ve got a bunch of them.

In the last 15 tournaments played under the one-and-done rule, 60 teams made the Final Four. It’s important to note right away: 36 of those 60 Final Four teams had a player selected in the first round the same year (including projected first-round picks from Baylor and Gonzaga this year). That’s 60%. Talent is good!

But only 12 of those 60 Final Four teams had a one-and-done player selected in the first round. That’s only 20%. Only 10 of those 60 had a one-and-done player selected in the lottery, the top 14 picks. That’s 16.7%.

The idea that one-and-dones = tournament success built momentum early: Greg Oden’s 2007 Ohio State team, which we know plenty about, made the title game. Oden went on to be the first pick in the draft, with fellow one-and-dones Mike Conley (fourth) and Daequan Cook (21st) also going in the first round. The following year UCLA rode freshman Kevin Love (and sophomore Russell Westbrook) to the Final Four, while Derrick Rose was free throws away from winning a national title at Memphis. Oden’s NBA career didn’t work out, but the rest of this group – Conley, Love, Rose, plus Durant – has had tremendous NBA success.

Two years later, John Calipari walked through that door to Lexington and immediately brought the model to blue-blood Kentucky. John Wall and Demarcus Cousins fell in the Elite Eight, but went first and fifth in the draft. Brandon Knight went eighth as the Cats made the Final Four in 2011. And then in 2012, the breakthrough: Kentucky won the title with Anthony Davis and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist going 1-2 in the NBA Draft as one-and-dones, plus Marquis Teague at 29th (and sophomore Terrence Jones at 18th – again, talent helps!).

Kentucky’s success got Duke in the one-and-done business. The Cats were back in the Final Four in 2014 with James Young and Julius Randle in the lottery. And then in 2015, you had superteams of freshmen: Kentucky’s Karl-Anthony Towns went first, with Trey Lyles (12th) and Devin Booker (13th) also in the lottery, along with sophomore Willie Cauley-Stein (sixth). Thanks to Gonzaga’s defeat in this year’s title game, this is still the best team of the KenPom era, though they lost to Wisconsin in the Final Four. And the Badgers were then vanquished by a Duke squad with three one-and-done first rounders: Jahlil Okafor (third), Justise Winslow (10th), and Tyus Jones (24th).

After the 2015 season, it seemed there was no turning back. But instead, the opposite has happened.

In the last five Final Fours, only Zach Collins (Gonzaga 2017, 10th pick) and, we assume, Jalen Suggs have been one-and-done lottery picks. Tony Bradley, a reserve on North Carolina’s 2017 title team, was taken 28th overall. Malachi Richardson from Syracuse went 22nd in 2016. So in the last five Final Fours, only 10% of participants have featured a one-and-done lottery pick, and only 20% a one-and-done first round pick.

Tennessee needs to make the Final Four before it can worry about winning it all. But when you look at the title teams over the last 15 tournaments, only those 2012 Kentucky and 2015 Duke squads featured one-and-done lottery picks…and again, they both had two of them, plus a third freshman taken later in the first round. If you’re going to go that route, sure, you can win it all with freshmen…but only Duke and Kentucky have been able to recruit at that level, and they’ve only got one title to show for it that way each.

Again: talent is good. Twelve of the last 15 national champions had a player drafted in the first round that same year, and two of the three that didn’t were 2006 Florida and 2016 Villanova, who repeated and won two-in-three years, respectively. Talent is good. But the idea that one-and-done talent should automatically lead to NCAA Tournament success is far more flawed than it was six years ago.

One-and-dones still transition straight to the lottery: in the 2018 and 2019 NBA Drafts, 17 of the 28 lottery picks were freshmen. But when you look at what those 17 freshmen did in the NCAA Tournament:

Year	Player	School	Pick	Result
2019	Zion Williamson	Duke	1	Elite Eight
2019	RJ Barrett	Duke	3	Elite Eight
2019	Darius Garland	Vanderbilt	5	n/a
2019	Coby White	North Carolina	7	Sweet 16
2019	Jaxson Hayes	Texas	8	n/a
2019	Cam Reddish	Duke	10	Elite Eight
2019	Tyler Herro	Kentucky	13	Elite Eight
2019	Romeo Landford	Indiana	14	n/a
2018	Deandre Ayton	Arizona	1	First Round
2018	Marvin Bagley III	Duke	2	Elite Eight
2018	Jaren Jackson Jr.	Michigan State	4	Second Round
2018	Trae Young	Oklahoma	5	First Round
2018	Mo Bamba	Texas	6	First Round
2018	Wendell Carter Jr.	Duke	7	Elite Eight
2018	Collin Sexton	Alabama	8	Second Round
2018	Kevin Knox	Kentucky	9	Sweet 16
2018	Shai Gilgeous-Alexander	Kentucky	11	Sweet 16

If you played for Duke and Kentucky, alongside multiple one-and-dones, you made an Elite Eight. If not, you didn’t. Almost half of these guys didn’t get out of the first weekend.

So yes, Tennessee should continue to recruit talented players. But, as Rick Barnes already knows, the idea that you can find breakthrough success on the shoulders of one-and-dones is a struggling one these days. The Vols still need first-round talent, no doubt. But they appear more likely to have tournament success when that talent is developed over multiple years, not recruited and soon-to-be gone.

As usual, credit Ken Pomeroy for being on top of it: in preseason, Tennessee’s fresh-faced basketball team rated an even 20.00 (points better than the average team per 100 possessions). The Vols, of course, are now done playing; with a handful of tournament games left their rating will still fluctuate slightly. But at the moment, the 2021 Vols have a rating of 19.85.

Whether using SP+ for football (more on 2021 projections using those ratings soon) or KenPom in basketball, it’s helpful to put Tennessee’s seasons into better historical context. Not all 8-4s are created equal, nor are all five seeds in the NCAA Tournament.

This year in particular felt like such a struggle to define, and still does, because there are so many unique elements. The Vols had what appear to be a pair of one-and-dones, the program’s first and only since Tobias Harris ten years ago. Keon Johnson routinely appears in the lottery in mock drafts, Jaden Springer sprinkled throughout the first round. That’s new for us.

They helped the Vols earn a five seed, where Tennessee promptly lost to Oregon State, who continued to ride an incredible hot hand into the Sweet 16 after winning the Pac 12 Tournament. It was the first time the Vols had been upset in the first round (seeded 7 or higher) since the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985. That’s new for us.

The freshmen had to carry the weight without John Fulkerson, which they did sensationally well at Rupp Arena and admirably so against Alabama in the SEC Tournament. But when Yves Pons also left the floor in foul trouble against Oregon State, the Vols just looked so lost. It’s a lot to ask for the freshmen on that stage for the first time. The Vols played in the NCAA Tournament without one of their most important players. That’s new for us.

In fact, part of the story of Rick Barnes in the tournament at Tennessee has been bad luck. Kyle Alexander was injured in the first round romp over Wright State in 2018, and didn’t play against Loyola Chicago where the Vols fell to a shot that hit the rim 1234217 times before going in. Officiating squabbles aside, the Vols fell to Purdue when Ryan Cline hit seven three pointers on ten attempts, many of them outrageous. And the Vols fell to Oregon State without the services of John Fulkerson. The tournament has not been kind to the orange and white.

Meanwhile, the teams that have beaten Tennessee have made themselves look even better beyond. Loyola, of course, went to the Final Four. Purdue took the eventual national champions to overtime 48 hours later. Oregon State is still playing and just beat the potential number one overall pick. The Vols may have been the higher seed in each of those games, but the difference between wasn’t as high as we thought going in.

And all of this, of course, falls into the context of the pandemic, brand new and burdensome for all of us. Whether you fire Jeremy Pruitt with or without cause, lose as a five seed, or have a Top 10 baseball team, the pandemic should still get the first and last word on your season.

“Tournament results aside,” is what I want to type, and that’s a funny phrase. The tournament is what all of college basketball builds to. But if you make it pass/fail for your season, you’re going to fail a lot more than you like, especially in the most upset-prone bracket of all-time this year (see also: the pandemic) coming one tournament after the most loaded Sweet 16 of all-time, which happened to happen the year Tennessee had its best team.

That 2019 team still stands alone, both in weeks at number one and in KenPom’s ratings. Here are the tiers we used for Tennessee’s teams in the KenPom era (2002-present) during the preseason – it’s interesting to note where the 2021 Vols will ultimately land:

• Tier A – The Current Peak: 2019 (26.24 KenPom)
• Tier B – The Fully Capable: 2014 (23.69), 2018 (22.27), 2008 (22.17)
• Tier C – The Dangerous: 2021 (19.85), 2006 (19.44), 2010 (18.50), 2007 (18.29)
• Tier D – The Unnecessary Defense of Bruce Pearl: 2009 (16.48)
• Tier E – The Bubble (but probably the NIT)
• Tier F – That’s okay, we’re a football school (Buzz Peterson’s last two years, Donnie Tyndall, Rick Barnes’ first year)

In KenPom, four of Tennessee’s five best teams of the last 20 years belong to Barnes and Cuonzo. The 2021 Vols are fifth on that list, currently first in Tier C, together with 2006, 2007, and 2010 from Bruce Pearl’s era.

I like to think of SP+ and KenPom as, “Who would I least like to face?” And some nights, these Vols fit that bill. They beat Colorado and Arkansas, both in the KenPom Top 15. They famously waxed a pair of AP Top 15 squads at Missouri and vs Kansas. And they still made memories late with back-to-back, emotionally-charged wins over Florida. They won seven regular season SEC games by 10+ points, trailing only 2008, 2014, and 2019.

And they lost three regular season SEC games by 10+ points, trailing only 2007 and 2010 among Tennessee’s recent tournament teams. They played only two one-possession games all year. Their worst lost on the slate is at Auburn, 63rd in KenPom. Only the 2006 and 2019 Vols had a better record there in terms of not losing to bad teams; this team’s “bad” wasn’t as bad as you think.

The main issue is that their good never got to be as good as it was in mid-January. At 10-1 (4-1), the Vols had only lost to Alabama in a game when Jaden Springer got hurt and, again, Pons was in foul trouble. At that point the Vols were sixth nationally in KenPom, and we were having conversations about a one seed and winning the SEC. From there, Springer was still banged up, lineups got weird, responsibilities were shifted, and along the way Tennessee went 8-8.

So, what’s the best comparison for this year? I don’t think there is one.

It has the one-and-done and off-the-court weirdness of 2011, with the mid-season fall of 2001 (so perhaps the lesson is, be careful in years that end with 1). But it also had some truly dominant regular season performances that could be matched only by some of Tennessee’s very best teams, with no very worst losses. It’s not a good comparison on the floor or in the record book, but maybe 2009 is its best counterpart, simply for the way this year doesn’t feel like it belongs with any others.

I remain grateful that they played at all. And more good news is on the way: Kennedy Chandler is Tennessee’s highest-rated signee since Tobias Harris and Scotty Hopson (again, no guarantees, see 2011). Four-star wing Jahmai Mashack joins him in the incoming class. John Fulkerson might be back. Who knows what the transfer portal will bring.

Without Keon, Springer, and Pons, it’ll feel like the ceiling is a little lower going in. But in reality, it’ll be the same question mark from this season as the Vols seek to put so many new pieces in important places.

Under Rick Barnes, Tennessee is giving themselves better chances than ever in terms of talent, beating Kentucky more than ever, and losing to fewer bad teams than ever. And though we thought the bracket was kind going in this year, the tournament itself is yet to return the favor to one of his teams.

At the same time, the tournament will always be the last impression your team leaves. As Tennessee continues to pursue just its second Elite Eight in program history, here’s hoping the Vols can build on what they learned from this year and carry the program’s history forward not just November-February, but in March as well.

Go Vols.