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University of Louisville Men's Basketball Post-Game Quotes
December 08, 2007 | Men's Basketball
Dec. 8, 2007
Recap | Box Score | Notes | AP Photo Gallery 
Louisville Head Coach Rick Pitino
"Dayton played a very good basketball game, we did not. We practiced that way the whole week. We have a lot of distractions, four out of five days of bad practices, too many standing in the way of our improvement. There are too many things that we deal with on a daily basis other than basketball that is affecting our team. That's not something we can have. It's something that we have to concentrate on, the fundamentals of the game. It's hurting us, especially on the defensive end. We have to stop letting people that are smaller than us get in around the rim and get layups. It's happened in the last two games in a row."
"We played like a young basketball team. Rather than move the ball and go inside- out, we fell right into the trap that they set for us. We brought the ball down too much. We're still not where we need to be fundamentally and we are paying for it now. We almost paid for it last week against Miami and we are paying for it now. We're just not understanding basketball and the fundamentals. The sophomore class is not paying attention to the game of basketball, too many of them caring what people think. They're not worrying about what's important and what's significant. And in practice evaluation, the guys are getting way too low. This is not a military camp here. Our basketball practices are all basketball for two hours. It's up and down, you've got to focus in on it and we're not doing that right now."
(On playing Roberts) "We didn't want to play him the way we played him. We didn't want to back into the level of the screen. We wanted to stay on him and play him correctly, even our zone was bad tonight. The bottom line is we fed off bad shots. We can't press like we want to press because we just can't, we run out of gas too fast. We are a little restricted. This is a bad loss for us, any home loss is a bad loss. We've got to get our sophomore class paying attention more."
"We've got inside people open, if we've got somebody five feet open and you're taking a challenged shot, it makes sense not to do that.
(Do you think its maturity?) "I think it just the way we are practicing. Our practices have been terrible, just awful. They have been that way all year."
Dayton Coach Brian Gregory
"Obviously we are very pleased with our guys' performance today against what I think is going to be a great team this year coached by one of the better coaches that have ever coached. As a program and a team it was a great win. We got a lot of great basketball from a lot of different guys. I was very pleased with the second half. We lost it there for a couple of minutes and Louisville made us lose it. We gathered our composure and really made plays during that last ten minutes. We took a step forward today as a team and some individuals took a big step forward. We just have to keep building on this. We were fortunate to beat Louisville last year but they were the ones who continued to improve during the year and make it to the tournament and past the first round. Those are the things we inspire to do. It is a great win and it is one of the steps we want to take as a team."
(On Brian Roberts) "He's a great player. He doesn't take bad shots; I think he took one bad shot today. He was very aggressive. The players around him are playing better. He's had sub-par games but the others around him stepped up and helped us win those games. We are starting to evolve as a team and Brian is the marquis player and we run a lot of things through him but we're getting a lot of good basketball from other guys. You cannot simply key in on him."
(When Louisville went ahead) "We lost a little bit of our poise on offense and took some quick shots. We wanted to attack and if you saw some of the plays we made tonight they were in transition and we were attacking them in the open court. That's the way we want to play. We have the athletic ability to do some of that. The next step is to make good decision with that ability. We took some quick shots and they weren't necessarily bad shots when we weren't open. We just didn't have the chance to break them down. We're a better offense when we reverse the ball and get the defense out of shape and then use our defense ability to attack the basket. We went back to that in the last ten minutes."
