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University of Louisville Men's Basketball Post-Game Quotes
December 10, 2005 | Men's Basketball
Dec. 10, 2005
Recap | Box Score | Notes | Photo Gallery
Louisville Head Coach Rick Pitino
"That was a lot of fun from coaching standpoint. Often coaches don't have fun during the course of the game, but it was a lot of fun to watch passing and unselfish play, getting other people shots and cuts. That was really exciting. We rebounded the ball well. Anytime you play that style of offense, you're going to look good. I thought this was Tello's (Juan Palacios) finest game he's played since he came back this year."
"I thought all our guys were terrific. We've got a long way to go on the defensive end, but that will come with practice. We'll get a lot of practice over the semester break. We've only been together for three or four days. We see the potential."
(On Akron) "They're a very good basketball team. We played by far our best game tonight. They're going to compete, they're tough to guard and we did a good job rebounding the ball. That was a lot of fun to watch from a coaching standpoint."
(On Juan Palacios) "He's not going to be 100 percent this year because his ankle is not going to be 100 percent. He can get his skill level back basketball wise. It's one thing to get your ankle better, it's another not to have your ball handling, shooting and ball fake skills. You don't play basketball for six months. It's going to take some time. He'll get it back - he probably won't be 100 percent until the end of the season."
(On Bryan Harvey) "Every young man has an adjustment period to this program. You come in, and not allowed to miss a class, you have to be early for everything. It's an adjustment period. He's never worked like this in his life and that's an adjustment. We haven't given up on him, but he has to understand, whether you're a freshman, junior or senior. You have to have work ethic second to none. We have a tolerance of mistakes, but not tolerance of lack of work ethic. Often times good kids like him think they're working hard, but they're not. It's tough to overcome."
(On Terrence Williams) "He's so much different than I anticipated when I recruited him. He calls everybody the night before the game, gets them fired up. He's so much into the team and into winning. You wouldn't have thought he would have come in with that much substance. That's a pleasant surprise, he's so much into the team and into winning."
Akron Head Coach Keith Dambrot
"I think, number one, Louisville finally got together and played better than they've played. Some of that was them and some of that was us. The tempo was good for them. We want to play better defense, but they played pretty well overall."
(On rebounding) "We don't have our best rebounder, Jeremiah Wood, we lost him for the year. It's like everything else, you lose your best score you might have trouble scoring, if you lose your best ball-handler, you might have trouble handling the ball. Right now we have a hard time rebounding. That was last year when he got after ten games. Early in the game, we just couldn't rebound the ball and that hurt us. Later on we quit guarding completely."
(On Juan Palacios) "You've got McDonald's All-American. If you let Palacios do what he does, which is stand out there and shoot it, he's going to hurt you bad. We did a good job of letting him do what he likes to do. We did a decent job on Dean in the first half until we tired. If you let him shoot a jump shot on you, he's going to hurt. Overall physically we had a hard time with them. We probably weren't as prepared as we needed to be. I think we caught them on a decent night and I thought they played pretty well."
