With two minutes and 25 seconds remaining in Saturday afternoon’s Tennessee-Vanderbilt men’s basketball game in Nashville, Commodores guard Duke Miles hit an off-balance 3-pointer over Ja’Kobi Gillespie as the shot clock expired to give the hosts a 63-60 lead.
It could have been one of those back-breaking moments for the Volunteers, but it wasn’t.
Tennessee would answer with a 9-2 closing run and came away with a 69-65 triumph before a crowd of 14,316 inside Memorial Gym. The Vols improved to 20-7 overall and to 10-4 in Southeastern Conference play with the comeback win, clinching a fifth consecutive season with 20 or more victories.
“I thought both teams played every possession with everything they had,” Tennessee coach Rick Barnes said afterward in a news conference. “At the end, some things fell our way. Defensively, we stayed locked in against a team that’s as hard to defend as any team you’re going to play against. I’m proud of the effort our guys put in.
“It was a great college basketball game, and I would say that had we lost, because I saw how hard every guy on the court played.”
The No. 19 Commodores dropped to 21-6 overall and to 8-6 in SEC play.
Tennessee responded to the 3-pointer by Miles with Bishop Boswell’s layup and jumper to take a 64-63 advantage, though Vanderbilt went back in front 65-64 on a pair of Tyler Tanner free throws with 1:18 to play. Nate Ament’s contested jumper with 54 seconds left put the Vols ahead for good at 66-65, with two Gillespie free throws with 13 seconds remaining and an Amari Evans free throw with 1.8 seconds left capping the scoring.
“Nate Ament made a shot that was against perfect defense,” Vanderbilt coach Mark Byington said. “There might have been some shuffling of feet or whatever else, but he made the shot. Sometimes you do things right and you don’t get the right result.”
Gillespie led Tennessee with 17 points, with Ament adding 13 points and nine rebounds. The five-star freshman was just 3-of-13 from the floor but made all six of his free throws.
Boswell had nine points and four rebounds, while Felix Okpara and DeWayne Brown II each had eight points and four boards in the winning effort. Vols junior forward Jaylen Carey, who played last season for the Commodores, had seven points and seven rebounds.
“We knew it would be tough for him coming back here,” Boswell said. “He was telling us all week how much he wanted it, and we were going to have his back.”
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Tanner led Vanderbilt with 16 points, while Miles added 12 and Devin McGlockton scored 11. The Commodores were outrebounded by the Vols 39-30 as Tennessee won for the 15th time in the past 17 series meetings.
“It was a heck of a game,” Byington said. “There were some things that weren’t pretty, but both teams competed extremely hard. We came into the game the right way and played the right way, but the frustrating thing and the thing that sticks out is that we left too many things out there.
“They’re a tremendous defensive team and a tremendous rebounding team. Two teams wanted to win desperately, and we were on the wrong side of it.”
Okpara had a dunk and a pair of free throws to stake Tennessee to a 15-10 lead within the game’s first six minutes, but the Commodores used two 3-pointers by Chandler Bing and one by Tanner to highlight a 15-6 run that resulted in a 25-21 advantage with 8:52 before halftime.
Vanderbilt stretched its lead to 34-25 on a pair of free throws by Miles with 4:33 before halftime, but Tennessee closed on a 6-1 run to get within 35-31 at the break.
Miles also gave the Commodores their biggest lead of the second half at 49-42 on a 3-pointer with 12:55 to play before the Vols countered with a 15-4 surge to go up 57-53. Ament accounted for seven of those 15 points after scoring only four through the game’s first 28 minutes.
The Vols have a quick turnaround, facing Missouri (18-9, 8-6) in Columbia on Tuesday (9 p.m. Eastern on the SEC Network).
“You can have a great win and it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t put it behind you,” Barnes said. “It’s going to be hard Tuesday night.”
Contact David Paschall at [email protected].
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David Paschall has covered sports at the Chattanooga Times Free Press since 1999 and wrote for the Chattanooga Free Press in the nine years before that. David has mostly covered college athletics, with a focus on the University of Georgia from 2000 to 2019 and the University of Tennessee since 2020. He grew up in Chattanooga and is a graduate of the Baylor School and Auburn University. David has received multiple writing awards and has served as a Heisman Trophy voter since 2003. He has also worked in radio in Chattanooga and has been on the SEC Network’s “Classic Rewind” series since 2014. David and his wife, Kelly, have three children — Conner, Emily and Spencer.
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