There’s some emotional vulnerability in the air at Thompson-Boling tonight: the depleted Vols, who played hard and smart but just couldn’t get good looks to fall against their rivals over the weekend. And the Razorbacks, who weren’t even supposed to be here in Eric Mussleman’s first season, who were 16-5 (4-4) before losing consecutive games in overtime to Auburn and Missouri.
If you’re the Vols, you want to prevent what happened to Arkansas the second time around and let an emotional loss cost you a second game. Tennessee is also nicely positioned in the Ackbar seat, with Arkansas facing Mississippi State and Florida next.
But more than anything, this match-up is, on paper, more favorable to Tennessee than any on the rest of their schedule (non-Vanderbilt division).
Arkansas starts four players under 6’6″ and 6’8″ Reggie Chaney at center, who is the tallest player on their active roster. As such, the Razorbacks are one of the worst teams in college basketball at the thing that’s killed Tennessee the most recently: offensive rebounds. And they’re bad, in part, because they want to get back and set up their defense, which is built around taking away something the Vols don’t want much to do with anyway: three point shooting.
The Razorbacks are 336th nationally in offensive rebounding. They’re the best team in the country at defending the three, allowing 24.6% from the arc. Check and check for a Tennessee team that wants to go inside and won’t find much opposition in the way of height.
Honestly, every conversation with Arkansas should probably start with Mason Jones, one step ahead of Reggie Perry on the KenPom SEC Player of the Year race. The 6’5″ sophomore scored 18 points on the Vols last year, but it didn’t matter because Arkansas gave up 106. But you have to defend him everywhere: he gets the ball more than any player in the league, he’s responsible for 30% of Arkansas’ shots, and he’s tops in the league at drawing fouls. In the overtime loss at Auburn he took 12 twos, 12 threes, and 16 free throws, scoring 40 points in playing all 45 minutes.
There is a bit of a “just stop everyone else” with this team: he also had 34 in the loss to South Carolina on January 29. We’ve seen one player really wreck Tennessee when the Vols faced Anthony Edwards. If that’s the story again, Tennessee won’t have the firepower to match on the other end.
If you want the flicker of hope for the bracket, it looks like this: beat Arkansas at home tonight (50% in KenPom), get a win at South Carolina on Saturday (41%), take care of business against Vandy next Tuesday (84%). Then you’re 16-10 (8-5), and you’ve at least given yourself a chance against that ridiculous finish. There’s a lot to like in this match-up for the Vols. They just can’t let Jones wreck it by himself.
7:00 PM, SEC Network. You like the improvement from many of this team’s pieces. Now is the time for that improvement to lead to wins.
Go Vols.