INDIANAPOLIS — Tennessee assistant coach Justin Gainey handled the scouting report for the Vols’ first two games against Kentucky, so he was assigned the job again for Friday night’s Midwest Region semifinal.
But, truth be told, Gainey’s final report had the fingerprints of seniors Jahmai Mashack and Zakai Zeigler and other Vols veterans all over it.
The result? Tennessee avenged its two regular-season losses to Kentucky by shutting down the Wildcats from three-point range – and everywhere else – while producing a 78-65 victory that felt more like a 23- or 33-point margin. Kentucky’s only lead was at 3-2 as the Wildcats tied their season-low point total.
The second-seeded Vols (30-7) are back in the Elite Eight for the second year in a row.
Zeigler, a 5-foot-9 third-team All-American and one of four finalists for Naismith Defensive Player of the Year, had 18 points and 10 assists. Mashack, also a finalist for the DPOY award, scored just four points — but the 6-foot-4 guard finished with a career-high-tying five steals.
“We’ve got an advanced group,” Gainey said. “We’ve got older guys who’ve been here a long time. We’ve got guys who understand different schemes and the stuff we’re trying to do. We’re able to throw a lot at them.
“They watch a lot of film. They watch film on their own. They come in with questions. They talk to each other. Like, ‘Shack’ is great about that. ‘I saw this. Let’s do this and this and this.’ ‘Shack’ sent me an edit of Auburn guarding (Kentucky’s) zoom stuff: ‘Coach, I think we may need to watch this.’ It’s all of them talking and making adjustments. ‘I see this. Let’s do this.’ And so we’re able to make adjustments on the fly.”
Turned out Kentucky couldn’t run its zoom stuff — or any other stuff. In their regular-season meetings, Kentucky was 12-of-24 from three-point range in each game. Friday, the Wildcats finished 6-of-15 from long range.
Technically, that meant Tennessee didn’t meet its goal of limiting Kentucky to 39 percent accuracy from the arc — but everyone could see the Wildcats didn’t know what to make of the Vols’ defense.
“We switched up some ball-screen coverage on different guys, which normally we hadn’t done a lot of that from the beginning,” Gainey said. “Going in, we had special ball-screen coverage, so we made that adjustment. That off-the-ball screening stuff — they’re really good at that zoom stuff and that five-out stuff — so we switched more than we normally do.”
Koby Brea hit the Wildcats’ first 3-point attempt to give them a 3-2 edge at the 17:54 mark. They didn’t make another field goal — a Lamont Butler 3-pointer — until there was 13:31 on the clock.
By the second media timeout, Tennessee owned a 21-13 lead and Kentucky coach Mark Pope was telling CBS sideline reporter Evan Washburn that “their pressure has done a nice job of getting us a little stagnant.”
Pope probably was thinking about what Mashack had just done to his crew. During one 80-second spree, Mashack closed out hard on Brea and forced an errant 25-footer. On the next possession, he jumped a passing lane to swipe a pass from Collin Chandler that set up a Darlinstone Dubar 3-pointer. Two possessions later, Mashack produced another steal. It didn’t lead to more points, but the general effect was the same.
Tennessee led by as much as 39-20 in the first half, and Kentucky never got closer than 12 the rest of the way.
“Words can’t explain how much I put into this game,” Mashack said. “You can ask anybody. I was hyper-focused on it, man. I was doing everything in my power to figure out what actions we needed to run defensively, offensively, whatever, to come out with the victory.”
As the Vols jogged from the court to their locker room, there was no sense of gloating that they had just gotten revenge on Kentucky.
OK, maybe there was a little.
“We had a chip on our shoulder since we stepped in the film room,” said guard Jordan Gainey, Justin’s son who contributed 16 points off the bench. “And we proved it.”
“It feels amazing,” Mashack said. “The mentality that we had was to focus on four-minute games, to not let our foot off the gas. We didn’t want to win by a little bit. We wanted to dominate, especially defensively.
“We wanted it to be the best defensive game we played all year — and I felt we did a good job doing that.”
