Previewing Today's SEC Championship Game
SEC Championship Game – St. Louis
No. 4 Kentucky vs No. 2 Tennessee – 1:00 pm
I saw this stat yesterday and it’s still mind boggling. After Kentucky beat Alabama yesterday it moved to 48-2 all time in SEC Tournament semifinals. That’s absurd. I don’t care how strong/weak a conference is, going 48-2 in conference semifinals is flat out ridiculous. But, we’re here to talk about the title game. A third game between Kentucky and Tennessee, a series that Tennessee swept this year.
The biggest thing for me here is the fact Kentucky doesn’t have Jarred Vanderbilt. He’s a guy that can come in and defend either Schofield or Grant Williams, letting Kentucky go small and match up with that weird size Tennessee likes to run. Both guys scored double digits in both games this year, combining for 22 and 38 points. Not having Vanderbilt means Kentucky is going to have to rotate a crew of PJ Washington, Wenyen Gabriel, Nick Richards and Sacha Kileya-Jones on them. It’s going to be most important that Washington stays out of foul trouble as he’s the best matchup for Williams.
Tennessee has the No. 3 AdjD ranking on KenPom. What they do extremely well is simply bother teams. They do force a decent amount of turnovers, ranking 48th in the country, but what they do is just play physical. They don’t necessarily run a certain type of defense like you see with the pack line or a 2-3 or anything like that. They’ll switch screens and they chuck you crossing the lanes. Williams and Schofield are both strong enough to play in the post and push guys out to about 10 feet instead of the low block. What Kentucky is starting to do offensively is continuing to well is run Kevin Knox off of screens. Earlier in the year, Knox was standing around a lot on the wing and looking to attack off an ISO. Instead now they are running Knox off baseline screens and flex screens getting him moving. The other set Kentucky has been running more since the last meeting with Tennessee is a hi-lo set with a block to block screen. They’ll bring up Wenyen Gabriel to the high post, have Washington screen for Knox who runs a top curl cut to the other block. Keep an eye if they try to do that early and find a mismatch there.
I’m going to take Tennessee here today. This is a really good team that has a couple of different options to beat you. Look for them to try and get Williams the ball early, letting him attack in the mid post. From there look for them to get Lamonte Turner and Jordan Bowden in high ball screens and attacking that way.