No. 7 Tennessee returns home Wednesday after two wins in the Bahamas, welcoming Tennessee Martin to Knoxville.
The Volunteers (6-0) impressed at the Baha Mar Championship in Nassau. They defeated Virginia 64-42 in the opener, followed by a 77-62 win against then-No. 13 Baylor on Friday.
The trip to the Bahamas required the Volunteers to adjust on the fly during their two games in two days.
“I’m really proud of our staff for the job that they did and really proud of the players for being able to absorb the different things that we threw at them,” Volunteers head coach Rick Barnes said.
Standing out was Chaz Lanier, who scored 25 points on 7-of-10 shooting from beyond the arc. Lanier is sixth in the Southeastern Conference in scoring with an average of 17.7 points per game.
The Vols led by as many as 28 points, slowing toward the end of the second half when Baylor trimmed the lead to 15 points. The margin of victory was large enough to power Tennessee to a climb from No. 11 to No. 7 in the AP Top 25 poll.
“If we can continue to get better, we have a chance to have a really good basketball team,” Barnes said. “It’s a long way to go. We’re still early into the season. We’ve had some good wins over some good basketball teams.”
He continued: “I told our team that winning is good and that it feels good, but if you even think you’ve arrived this time of year, you’ll find out real quick you can get slapped in the face a few times. I hope we don’t have to do that to understand how much better we can become as a team.”
A team hoping to do the slapping is UT Martin (2-4), which comes to Tennessee with first-year NCAA Division I head coach Jeremy Shulman. The coach brought 14 years of experience at Eastern Florida State College, as well as some players who started at junior college.
Among them is leading scorer Josue Grullon. Grullon averaged 20.6 points last season with the Daytona State Falcons, and is doing the same with the Skyhawks, leading the team with 18.2 points per game. The junior hasn’t started a game for UT Martin but still averages 24.8 minutes and a 40.4 percent clip from 3-point range per game.
After a strong start to the year, winning two straight, the Skyhawks have four straight losses. Friday, UTM fell to Le Moyne 65-53, where Grullon was held to eight points on 2-of-8 shooting in 26 minutes.
“We don’t really talk a whole lot about, you know, wins and losses in our program,” Grullon said. “You know we really just talk about the things I think that can impact a game in every possession.”
Since 1993, the Vols have a 5-0 record over UT Martin, but the sides have only played once in the past 13 years. On Nov. 9, 2021, Tennessee handed the Skyhawks a 90-62 defeat.
–Field Level Media
