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University of Louisville Men's Basketball Post-Game Quotes
January 27, 2007 | Men's Basketball
Jan. 27, 2007
Louisville Head Coach Rick Pitino
"That was a heck of a win for us; obviously we are a young basketball team that did not rattle. They stayed with their poise, they hung tough. We sort of shot ourselves in the foot. You can't do that with a veteran team with the turnovers. We hadn't been turning the ball over at all, be we had ten in the first half, but the exciting thing for us is that we had one turnover in 20 minutes of play in the entire second half. That is one of the reasons when you are down and every possession counts, if you don't turn it over you get a legitimate shot at the basket or a legitimate shot at an offensive rebounds. We did a terrific job for a young team. I am very proud of these guys."
(On making a run) "They are very active up top. Edgar and Andre had a lot of trouble seeing what we call the middle of the zone, where you beat it to the baseline, beat them with a jumps hot, beat it to the exterior and Edgar was having a difficult time getting it in there. T-will is 6-5 and can look in there much better and that allowed us to make our run."
(On the man to man) "We play man on misses and zone on mades. It is hard to play when Will Scott is in there. As good of a shooter as he is, Will sucks on defense; I tried to think of a nice way to put it. He will get better on defense. He hit some big shots for us. It is just that this is new to him."
(On the comeback) "David Padgett kept saying at every timeouts:' there is a lifetime left, a lifetime left.' Don't panic, we are still there. We just had to make some adjustments in our zone and make our proper rotations, so we let some of their interior people beat us, rather than their perimeter people. We did an excellent job on them in the second half. I cannot tell you how pleased I am with these guys, because nothing comes easy for this basketball team, but they just keep working so hard. They have had to battle so many injuries - such a lack of continuity. They never got down one time. When a lot of you got down but they never did. I don't mean you personally. If you are guilty raise your hands."
(On freshmen contributions) "Earl is playing really good basketball right now. And the good thing is, I said this all along, he is going to be a great one. Our freshmen, I am very excited about (them). They are going to stay together and grow into a terrific nucleus. T-Will is also going to be with them. Andre is about eight pounds overweight and still not back into basketball shape. So he'll be better soon too in the next few weeks."
(On the difference in Palacios (Tello) in second half) "He was well rested for doing nothing in the first half. I just reminded him (Tello) he didn't have a rebound, wasn't playing defense and that basically his head was in Medellin. I said it in a very nice way."
(On David Padgett's play) "Early in the year, when David was running down the floor, you guys didn't know this, and we didn't say it, like we don't say Tello can't lift his arm to shoot, David was running the first four or five games of the season, he would run down the floor and he could literally not stop. But His knees are better than they have ever been. He has no pain, no swelling, nothing hurts and he is pain free. It has happened sooner than I ever anticipated. Now he pivots, he stops, he dunks, so he's just a totally different ball player. We are excited about that for him, especially."
(On David leaving the game) "If Tello would have picked up the slack, that wouldn't have been a problem. The team would have been fine with Terrance (Farley), because Terrance gave us some good blocks and good play. They showed the poise of a veteran team. They really did down the stretch. I thought Earl Clark played terrific. They all contributed to the win."
"T-will took some ill-advised shots. We were taking some threes that were three feet beyond the college three and we started stepping me and making good plays especially with T-Will at the point. That helped our offense. I told T-Will, `you can go 0-30 from the college three' but if you are going to jack it up there from four feet behind the line, then I am going to have a problem with that. They know our philosophy just like Jerry at the end of the game. That is our philosophy and so you go with it. That is the only way a team that just shoots the ball average will become a good shooting team if they are totally free of any pressure or stress from missing."
"I just told them not to read (newspapers) or go on websites and stay with your families. Just understand that I think you are great, the coaches think you're great. We think you are working extremely hard When you have a strong work ethic, good things will happen. When you get down, and you get negative, bad things happen so I am not saying you guys shouldn't be down but I don't think you gave the team an honest break with the injury situations. That is my only problem with you. As far as us losing, that is the breaks of the game. Everybody is supposed to, that is your job, you never gave them a chance with the injures to get to this point. We are still not over the hump. We are not falling in love with ourselves. We have to go to into a tough place in Cincy, one of our archrivals, who just beat West Virginia and gave Georgetown fits. So we are proud but we are not falling in love with ourselves."
Syracuse Head Coach Jim Boeheim
"I thought we played extremely well for 34 minutes and then we just stopped rebounding the basketball. There were four possessions in a row where we got the miss and we got the rebound and put it back in, we just didn't rebound in the last five minutes. We made a couple of bad turnovers on offense but that's going to happen, I'm just disappointed that we played so well for so long and then just didn't rebound the ball in the end that was just very disappointing."
(On Darryl Watkins leaving the game) "It hurt, he is a big factor for us but we had enough in there where we certainly should have been able to rebound the better than we did."
(on Louisville's 3-point shooting) "They have shot more than anybody else in the league and that wasn't a problem."
(On the offensive play the last 9 minutes) "Either we made a bad turnover or missed a shot it was one or the other. They were back and forth between man and zone and we either made a bad turnover or missed an easy shot. We missed a couple of free throws and they took advantage of it. The biggest disappointment was we just stopped rebounding. There is just no excuse for that. we made a bad shot. We were back and fourth with man to zone."
(On guarding Terrance Williams) "I thought we did a good job on him the whole game, Sosa was killing us. He was getting by and making plays the whole game. We did a good job finding Williams the whole game until the end and then he just got lose twice and made two big shots but really it was our offense the last seven minutes and our efforts on the boards. It wasn't good enough, that was the ball game."
(On Palacios and Padgett's rebounding) "Well it wasn't even them, their guards got a couple of those rebounds and put them back in. We're just very disappointed with our effort on the boards."
(Changing their defensive strategy) "No our defense wasn't the problem. We just stopped rebounding, they didn't make that many shots against our defense. They got too many offensive rebounds and some of them were in transition off our mistakes. When we made some bad turnovers, three or four I the last minutes but that can happen."
(on Josh Wright) "Well, we were playing better without him. We had it real good for 10 to 12 minutes, it wasn't necessarily his play, it was just that Andy got going. We are a little bigger, I thought we really just played well down that stretch - that's all."
