Vols forward Igor Milicic Jr makes honest admission about the last few minutes of Tennessee's loss to the Kentucky Wildcats
After trailing for most of the game, the Tennessee Vols took the lead against the Kentucky Wildcats late in the second half on Tuesday night in Lexington and it looked like the Volunteers were going to pull off a nice come-from-behind the win in Rupp Arena. Tennessee, however, was outscored 17-4 in the final four […]
After trailing for most of the game, the Tennessee Vols took the lead against the Kentucky Wildcats late in the second half on Tuesday night in Lexington and it looked like the Volunteers were going to pull off a nice come-from-behind the win in Rupp Arena.
Tennessee, however, was outscored 17-4 in the final four minutes of the game, resulting in a 75-64 loss to the Wildcats.
The big question for Vols fans after the game was how did Tennessee go from leading 60-58 with just under five minutes to play to losing by 11 points?
Vols forward Igor Milicic Jr suggested after the game that it was because Tennessee got "too excited" about the comeback and didn't play good enough defense down the stretch.
“I think we got too excited about the comeback and we wanted to win on offense when all we had to do was play defense and keep the one point lead we had with four or five minutes to go," said Milicic. "We got a little excited and it just didn’t go our way. We lost our head and defensively, they scored on us way too much at the end.”
Moving forward, Milicic said that the Vols have to control their emotions better late in games that are close.
"Not get emotional," explained Milicic when asked what Tennessee needs to do to win close games. "We got excited, like I said, about playing offense and forgot about defense…we just gotta let our habits take over and play our brand of basketball, which we didn't in the last five minutes. I feel like that's the biggest lesson we gotta take (from the loss to Kentucky)."
The good news is that Tennessee is more than good enough to beat Kentucky. Even after getting outshot by the Wildcats (Vols were 3-of-18 on three-pointers while UK was 12-of-24), the Vols were still in position to win the game late.
Tennessee doesn't need to make major changes (though they do need to shoot better moving forward), they just need to continue to compete late in games without worrying about the scoreboard (which means nothing until the final buzzer). If the Vols can find a way to keep to their composure late in close games, they'll start ending up on the right side of these close SEC matchups.
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