Tennessee basketball always was going to be good. Dalton Knecht makes it special | Estes
This is getting ridiculous now. Already was, though, if you think about it.
The best player by miles on a loaded Tennessee basketball team – heck, the best scorer right now in the SEC and maybe the entire country – played for Northern Colorado last season.
Dalton Knecht just kind of happened.
Who saw this coming? Knecht showed up and started doing what transfers from Northern Colorado don't do to the SEC. He’s dominating it.
He’s making it look easy and challenging well-worn narratives that have been attached to Rick Barnes’ usually-good-but-never-great Vols, because he's turning veteran cornerstones like Zakai Zeigler, Santiago Vescovi and Josiah-Jordan James into complementary pieces.
Where these Vols go in 2024, Knecht is going to take them. What an enticing idea that's becoming.
Barnes had good players at Tennessee, but he didn’t have anyone like Knecht. With him, Barnes' Vols are scary. They might be the coach's best team yet in Knoxville, and they'll have a better shot to succeed in March where previous editions have failed. Saturday night’s 75-62 victory at Vanderbilt’s Memorial Gym was just another hint.
That wasn’t because No. 5 Tennessee (15-4, 5-1 SEC) played wonderfully. It didn’t. It came out flat in a place where that shouldn’t have been the case. With an orange-shaded crowd giving them “a home game,” in Zeigler’s words, the Vols still trailed 35-30 at halftime against the SEC’s worst team. Vanderbilt (5-14, 0-6) was in this.
And then the Commodores weren’t anymore.
Beginning at the 15:16 mark of the second half, Knecht took over the game. He ripped off 12 consecutive points for the Vols, supplying a lead that would continue to increase. Sluggish Tennessee would go on to win with Knecht making 13 field goals, which matched all his teammates combined.
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Tennessee may not have won this game – and several others lately – without Knecht. He finished with 32 points, and 21 were after halftime. No one else on Tennessee’s team scored more than 12.
It was the fifth SEC game in a row in which Knecht dropped at least 25. During that stretch, he has averaged 32 and became the conference’s first player to reach 35 in back-to-back games since Shaquille O’Neal did it in 1991 for LSU.
As I said, ridiculous.
Or as Knecht surmised, “It’s crazy.”
“We haven’t had a lot of guys (in the SEC) since my time here that probably can match that type of output,” Vanderbilt coach Jerry Stackhouse said. “Obviously, I think Brandon Miller or a guy like that had that type of a presence on the floor.”
Nashville-area native Miller of Alabama, for the record, was the No. 2 pick in last year’s NBA Draft. Stackhouse, himself a third-overall pick in the 1990s, doesn’t make that comparison lightly.
But you understand it. Knecht, like Miller, is a strong perimeter shooter, but that’s not the only way he’s scoring. The Vols’ 6-foot-6 senior is a difficult cover for anyone. He can create his shot and get to the bucket so effectively that Tennessee knows it can just isolate Knecht and let him work against an unfortunate defender.
For an already deep Vols team with experience and firepower, adding a transfer of Knecht’s scoring ability would almost seem unfair if he wasn’t exactly what this defensive-oriented program has been missing.
“He can score at will,” Zeigler said. "Whenever he gets the ball, something good is going to happen.”
Tennessee’s NCAA Tournament losses in recent seasons have been the result of too many instances in which the Vols badly needed a bucket and didn’t know where to turn to get one.
No longer is that a problem of theirs.
Looks like a big one for Tennessee’s opponents, though.
Reach Tennessean sports columnist Gentry Estes at gestes@tennessean.com and on the X platform (formerly known as Twitter) @Gentry_Estes.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Dalton Knecht allows Tennessee basketball to dream about March Madness
