Tennessee Basketball: 2022-23 season preview and outlook for Volunteers

Last year, Tennessee Basketball got the ultimate sampling of the Rick Barnes experience. Phenomenal regular season, conference tournament success, and an early exit in the NCAA Tournament. Now, I hate to use my platform to rip on Barnes. He gets an extraordinary amount of criticism for how some of his teams have underperformed in a postseason format where such failures are way more common than successes.

But last year’s abrupt ending via a soul-crushing loss to Michigan was a quintessential letdown that Vol fans have accepted as merely routine. That is what was left of a fantastic season: a plethora of “what could have been” and not enough of “what was”.

But as much as the NCAA Tournament is the greatest postseason format ever placed on God’s Green Earth, an early exit in it does not make what Tennessee did last year a failure. Barnes put together a roster and a team that became elite defensively, and in SEC play became a fantastic three-point shooting team that helped propel them to a conference tournament title (their first since the Carter administration).

Even going into the NCAA Tournament, the Vols were a trendy pick to make the Final Four and for some experts, a dark horse to win the national title. But none of that mattered after the Vols‘ fateful date with the invisible lid placed on the rim that allowed them to only score eight points in the final 7:45 against Michigan.

That final 7:45 still doesn’t erase my memory of them taking two of three from an exceptional Kentucky team (one that also experienced an even more humiliating exit), a dominant home win over an elite Arizona team, or even their 13-1 stretch-leading up to the Michigan game that convinced America that this team was the hottest in the sport. As someone who has watched Tennessee basketball every year since early childhood, it was one of the most memorable.

This program is still on an upward trajectory and is still one of the premier programs in the SEC. They lose one-and-done star point guard Kennedy Chandler to the NBA, reserve Victor Bailey to George Mason, reserve big man Brandon Huntley-Hatfield to Louisville, and beloved fan favorite John Fulkerson to old age (he’s not dead, just out of eligibility after what felt like a decade).

So what does that leave them? The answer is a lot of veteran production. They return a grand total of 109 starts from last year and plenty of bench production. Let’s go ahead and look at what the starting lineup might look like this season.