Everything Rick Barnes Said Ahead of Tennessee Basketball vs. Duke in an Exhibition

The Tennessee Volunteers are set to take on the Duke Blue Devils in their second exhibition ahead of the regular season.

Ahead of this game, which is slated to begin at 7:00 PM EDT on Tuesday, Rick Barnes spoke with the media. Here is what he had to say about the upcoming contest.

Rick Barnes on the Mood of the Team After the First Exhibition

“I think everything’s good. I mean, we know that we’ve got a lot to learn just by being out and playing against somebody else, and there were some things in the first half that were good. We should have scored more points than we did in the first half. The second half, it really got down to when we hit some adversity, we just stopped altogether playing defense and rebounding, just think we’re gonna shoot the ball and think that’s gonna be good enough. We knew that would rear its head at some point in time; we knew that. That’s why I love these exhibition games, because you get a chance to let those things happen. And then, obviously, we’ve got a good group of guys. They wanna learn, but they don’t know what they don’t know right now. There’s some elementary things that we feel like that they should, but that’s not their fault, because we’re learning a whole new system and some of that we’ve got to do better jobs as coaches to teach them some of these things. But their attitudes have been good. I know they wanna be a good basketball team. But we haven’t been able to put the whole team together yet. Obviously, with Tyler (Lundblade), I don’t think he’ll play again tomorrow, but he’s making progress. And Jalen (Washington’s) status, we don’t know. But with that, we’re still trying to figure out a lot of things with this group. But we will figure it out,” Barnes said.

Rick Barnes on the Next Steps for Jalen Washington's Eligibility

“We don’t know when. I mean, we think he will be eligible to play. We think it will happen, but until then, he’s going at it. Obviously, we start thinking about rotations in games. We’re not planning on him doing that, obviously, tomorrow night, or Tyler. So we’re trying to figure out what group we’ve got to really get ready for tomorrow. And then when it comes back, it’s no different than trying, like with Tyler, trying to just incorporate guys that have been hurt, and he would be like that. But his attitude’s great. He’s getting better, and I’m sure he’s frustrated inside. He hasn’t said that to me, but he has to be, because he knows he’d like to have a chance to play. And it feels like he deserves that chance,” Barnes said.

Rick Barnes on If Tyler Lundblade Likely Not Playing is Precautionary

“Yeah, he’s getting back. I mean, if you guys watch practice, he’s out there with us, but he’s on a timetable where the doctors wanna make sure he’s slowly building back into it,” Barnes said.

Rick Barnes on If He Likes What He Sees From Tyler Lundblade

“Yeah, but like anybody who misses that much, first of all, he did a phenomenal job keeping his conditioning up, especially with the back problem that he had. He’s smart, he’s experienced, and that’s what he and Jalen would bring us more than anything, just the fact that they’ve played college basketball. They know what it’s about, and some of these guys are, obviously, the young guys haven’t, and some of these guys haven’t played at the level that we know that we’ve gotta play at,” Barnes said.

Rick Barnes on Terrence Hill Jr. vs. Xavier

“I think he will learn a lot. I think he did learn a lot. I mean, I thought defensively; he’s making strides each and every day. But not just Terrence; all of us have gotta get better in terms of understanding our system. We’ve got some guys that simply are in a denied stance when they should be in a gap stance, just subtle things that they’ve gotta get right. I mean, certain things that we’ve gotta do to make our defense work. We’ve gotta get everybody on the same page. Our ball screen defense was not very good, and that was a concern, cause we spent so much time on that. And offensively, took too many bad shots, too many quick shots. And you really do kinda expect that in the first time out. And I’m curious to see how much better we’ll be there in terms of shot selection, and if we can be a little bit cleaner with what we’re doing on the defensive end,” Barnes said.

Rick Barnes on If He Believes the Bad Shots Increased When Xavier Took a Lead

“I do, no doubt. I thought that everybody thought that, okay, I gotta go score quick and make something happen. And first of all, Xavier is a good basketball team. And that’s why we love playing those teams, because we do wanna get exposed in these exhibition games. I mean, there’s no doubt, we’re not, I mean, yeah, if you win, you win. But I’d rather get exposed more than winning a basketball game right now. Because as much as we harp on these things, sometimes it takes exposure like that to really grab their attention,” Barnes said.

Rick Barnes on If He Plans to Do a Scouting Report on Duke

“Yeah, we’ll have a little bit more, obviously, because we’ve got a little more live tape that we can go with, and like I said the first time, we wanted to see if some of it, if they could on their own fix it, because we’re gonna have to be able to do that. Because as the season goes on, we go into games, coaches wanna add different stuff here or there. We’ve gotta be able to defend that. And we believe if we play with our principles, we can defend anything that somebody throws at us,” Barnes said.

Rick Barnes on the "Defense Comes First" Mindset

“Well, I think the tough thing is you can’t defend turnovers. And our turnovers, we had some bad turnovers, and you can’t defend them, especially the ones we had the other night. And you go back, and you look, and I think they had 27 points in the first half and I think 10 were off turnovers. And so it’s understanding basketball. It’s really understanding. And I’ve always said, and Coach Knight told me this many, many years ago. He said, you’ve gotta understand what goes into losing before you can understand what goes into winning. And because the best teams never beat themselves. And Mr. Haslam always reminds me, General Neyland, the team that makes the fewest mistakes wins. And it’s pretty simple. But it’s hard to get young guys to understand. Not only are you trying to win the game, but you’re trying to win every possession on both ends. And if you win the most possessions, you’re gonna win. And with this group, cause we’ve got so many new people. I’m not gonna say young, cause they’re not all young, but we’ve got so many new ones that they have to understand, really, what goes into losing. And from that, we’ll figure out how to win,” Barnes said.

Rick Barnes on Keeping Miles Rubin Out of Foul Trouble

“Well, it goes back to him, his way doesn’t work. He’s wanting to try to steal the ball instead of playing position. At this level, guys are gonna catch the ball. You just hope that when you catch them, then you gotta guard it. And yeah, you try to force them off. It’s a game of space, trying to force them off their space. But when you are fouling to do that, it’s not any good. He doesn’t understand doing his work early yet, and he’s always playing catch-up, playing from behind. That’s what gets him in foul trouble," Barnes said.

Rick Barnes on How Exhibition Games Translate to Growth

“That’s a great question because I wish we had five. Beause we practice so much throughout the summer. I think the way you get better is to play games and get exposed by other teams, play different ways. They’re gonna throw some things at you that you need. But now we’ll see if our guys can grow from these games. I mean, we’ll see if we can make any growth from the other night because we know what we’ve got to fix. We’ve worked on it. We had a long film session. But it goes back to what happened, we were prepared for it, but we just didn’t execute it. We’ve talked about the mindset a lot. Some of it is mindset and understanding the game. That’s probably what (it is) with this group right now. First of all, they’re all playing with probably the best group of guys they’ve ever played with. They don’t know how to play together yet. But we’ll get there. This game and the Davidson will be another great scrimmage for us before we get ready to go in a week,” Barnes said.

Rick Barnes on If These Games Factor in Who Plays Well Together on the Court

“We are doing that, because analytically we’ll be able to get something from it. We’ve just got a small dose of that right now where we really can’t tell a lot. We’re just trying to figure out, again, when the lights come on, what some of these guys are going to do. You expected the young guys to be a little bit nervous, especially the freshmen. But I just wanna see us do what we practice, and we didn’t do that the other night,” Barnes said.

Rick Barnes on His Memories of Playing at Duke

"A lot. At Clemson, certainly, I was in there four different times. I grew up in the state when I watched Duke be very successful. Believe it or not, I actually interviewed for a job there one time with Coach (Mike) Krzyzewski. Just the utmost respect for him and what he — because he went in there and first couple years weren’t great years, and turned it around and built one of the great dynasties there. And I have great respect for Jon Scheyer. I think he’s a terrific basketball coach. But being in the building there is a neat experience. We were able to win in there our first year at Clemson. And actually, we won and swept ’em that year. That was maybe a first for Clemson in a long time. But I just have great respect for the way Mike’s done it, and the way he did it. I’ve got to live that in my lifetime and see him do it. I’m thankful that he gave me a chance to interview with him. I was an assistant at George Mason, and then I coached against John Scheyer, and obviously, he’s done a terrific job,” Barnes said.

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