By Stephen Mason
BROOKLYN, N.Y. — Looking at the score at the half, it seemed like the top-20 matchup between No. 16 Louisville and No. 17 Tennessee was going to live up to the billing: a classic between two storied programs in the Shark’s Beauty Champions Classic. However, the second half could not have been more of a different story.
Despite entering halftime trailing by only six, the issues the Lady Vols managed to cover up in the first half haunted them in the second half, which the Cardinals dominated. In the end, the Lady Vols were handed a stinging 89-65 loss, one that will haunt the team for a while.
“It’s a great event, and it’s a great time to be in New York. It was a great crowd in an amazing facility,” head coach Kim Caldwell said. “When it treats you well, it’s really good for the game, and that is why I think this one hurts a little extra because we didn’t represent the game today.”
In today’s game, the better team was painfully obvious as the battle at the glass was a one-sided affair that affected every other aspect of the game. The final rebound tally was Louisville 59, Tennessee 38. While Tennessee covered this deficit in the first half by forcing Louisville into multiple turnovers, by the second half, the Cardinals had cleaned up their game and ran the Lady Vols out of the Barclays Center.
“We had a couple of bad breaks, and then we put our heads down and worried about things that we shouldn’t have worried about,” Caldwell said. “It kinda spread, and we couldn’t recover, and it turned into a 24-point loss. And if there were 10 more minutes, it would have been a 50-point loss.”
A player who provided a bright spot for the team was Zee Spearman, the senior forward who ended the afternoon with a double-double, pacing the team with 18 points and 12 rebounds. However, in Caldwell’s high-paced system, it takes 10 players playing well to have success.
“It’s just us playing together, honestly, because we play so fast, so sometimes we will turn the ball over,” Spearman said. “It’s just getting back on defense and matching up quickly. Also, when we’re on defense to box out and continue to get the rebounds.”
While the team has accomplished these goals against smaller, inferior opponents, in today’s matchup against a top-20 opponent, they failed at all of them.
“We didn’t rebound, we got beat to every 50-50 ball. They were leaps and bounds tougher than us today,” Caldwell said.
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this loss for Caldwell is that while her team has been improving in practice since the beginning of the season, those gains were not seen on the court in Brooklyn this afternoon.
“This is a terrible result, and I was hoping we were going to take a big step forward,” Caldwell said. “I do think we’ve gotten a lot better. It’s not showing up on the court, but in practice, everything is getting better.”
In the three non-conference games against ranked opponents, the Lady Vols are 0-3, and with only one game left before Southeastern Conference play begins, the team will have to find ways to beat good teams quickly.
“We’ve got to continue to stay together. This is a bad loss for us, but we can always come back,” Spearman said. “The season isn’t over … this is a young team, so it is going to take time.”
Up Next: The Lady Vols won’t have to wait long to try and get the taste of this loss out of their mouths as they return to the court Monday. In their last non-conference game, Tennessee will take on Southern Indiana at 6:30 p.m. in the Food City Center.