Tennessee basketball addressed its biggest remaining need on its roster earlier this week, adding a pair of shooting guards to its roster ahead of the 2025-26 season. Rick Barnes and his staff landed Louisiana Tech transfer Amaree Abram and French prep prospect Clarence Massamba.
The Vols now have 12 players on scholarship ahead of next season which is just one shy of the current 13 scholarship limit. Making roster management difficult is that the number could change to 15 if the ongoing House Settlement is approved in federal court.
Meeting with the media at the Big Orange Caravan stop in Nashville Wednesday, Barnes spoke with a belief that the settlement would pass.
“We really have three spots based with the new rules,” Barnes stated when asked about the one remaining spot.
But for the time being, Tennessee has just one spot and Barnes spoke like he was tentative to make any additions to his roster until he knows exactly what he’s working with from a scholarship standpoint.
We’ll, again, unless something just drops in that we think can help us we wouldn’t do anything with it. We feel good where we are right now,” Barnes said. “Again with the portal being what it is, still a lot of guys out there. Again, like I said, we recruit year around. If you go back to Santiago (Vescovi) we will always leave a spot because if you go back to Santi, he came in in the middle of the year. Because of cases like that you always try to have one scholarship available because of situations like that.”
There are a few players out there that Tennessee has been linked to in the portal, most notably Lafayette shooting guard Alex Chaikin and Kansas shooting guard Rakease Passmore. But Tennessee has not been eagerly pursuing either, including cancelling a visit with Passmore. With the portal closed, it seems unlikely that any new names emerge as candidates for the Vols.
Vescovi isn’t the only player that Tennessee has landed late in the recruiting cycle after holding a scholarship open. Barnes and his staff landed Zakai Zeigler in August and landed Tobe Awaka in mid May as part of its 2023 recruitign class before convincing him to enroll ahead of the 2022 season just over a month later.
All three players made an impact on Tennessee’s roster as true freshmen, particularly Zeigler and Vescovi, who each played over 22 minutes per game.
Tennessee has no glaring holes on its roster, doing a good job of balancing the number of players capable of playing each position. When it comes to high level talent, shooting guard remains a bit of a shortcoming. That could be a spot where Tennessee looks for another body in hopes of hitting gold again
