It was a sickening night inside Thompson-Boling Arena at Food City Center on Saturday night. Once again, Tennessee saw a big, double-digit second half lead disappear and morph into a costly loss, this time to Alabama 71-69, who took their first lead of the game with the final basket of the contest. Tennessee’s offensive futility continued and could not save them at the horn with a miss and a bumbling chaos of hands reaching for the ball as the horn sounded.
But this time, it was a tad bit more understandable.
Just a tad. Tennessee lost team superstar Nate Ament in the first half to a lower body injury. He got rolled up on a loose ball scramble by an Alabama player late in the first half, and he bent over backwards in a sickly fashion. He was tended to and was able to get off the floor. He did return in the second half briefly and scored a basket, but he left and did not return, clearly not healthy enough.
And without him, it was another slow death march against a rival in front of Vol fans’ eyes. A death by a thousand paper cuts that they couldn’t stop. The Vols’ 40-28 halftime lead shrunk quickly to 40-34. Tennessee pushed it back to double digits at 55-42, but that’s when Alabama’s Labaron Philan, Jr. went into a zone the likes of which I haven’t seen often this year. He finished the game with 21 points. It honestly felt like 61 points. He took the ball to the basket time and time and time again, and Tennessee failed to stop him one on one just about each time.
The Vols refused to come off shooters for help defense, and it’s kind of understandable why, but at some point, you have to adjust defensively, and Tennessee didn’t.
Still, Tennessee held a 69-67 lead with just over a minute left, but Aden Holloway juked Felix Okpara for an easy baseline jumper to tie it. After a Tennessee miss, Philan took JP Estrella to the lane, pulled up, and swished it. Tennessee called timeout, and Ja’Kobi Gillespie had a good look on a drive to the basket, but simply missed it. The ball was fumbled around, and that was it.
The more important thing now is Ament’s health and availability, because, from what we saw tonight, Tennessee isn’t going far in March without him.
