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University of Louisville Men's Basketball Post-Game Quotes
December 08, 2008 | Men's Basketball
Dec. 8, 2008
Recap | Box Score | Notes | Photo Gallery 
Louisville Head Coach Rick Pitino
(Opening Statement ) I want to thank Marques Maybin for getting behind the tournament and Kenny Klein's efforts for honoring Marques. We're very lucky to have Kenny Klein here at this University. He is always thinking of ways to honor our players and thinking of ways to make our program better. He is not just in charge of handling you people (media) He is the best in the business for nights like tonight. So we are very grateful.
It was a good basketball game it wasn't a great basketball game for us. We played a terrific game last night. We still brought it defensively and did a descent job tonight and were very pleased.
(On Louisville's tournament experience) I think we made great progress but we have a long way to go. There's no rhyme or reason for Jerry Smith or Edgar Sosa to miss free throws. Its one thing for Terrence Jennings and few other people, but there's no reason for that. If you're not making free throws you should live in the gym, it's the easiest shot in the world to make if you just practice it and we could spend a lot of time. It's going to bite us if we don't get better at it.
(On what Louisville did well) I think we're continuing to get better defensively. I think we're executing on our half court offense. We got down 20 times that's something we didn't do in the two exhibition games. That's because were playing better defense and were rebounding better. Rebounding is the most substantial improvement. We've gone from a poor rebounding team to a good rebounding team and that's been the catalyst to our break. We were shooting almost 65 percent.
(On off the bench talent) I thought (Jared) Swopshire came in and Earl was just waking up at the 11 minute mark. We woke him up Swopshire gave us a nice few minutes.
(On George Good and Terrence Jennings) I think George and TJ are both going to be good basketball players. They're going to improve a lot more than Samardo (Samuels). With Samardo what you see is what you get. They will catch up to Samardo, they may not have strength in terms of posting up, but defense and rebounding. TJ is really improving and George is really improving and they're both freshman. They are going to get better and better.
(On Samardo Samuels) I think he is doing really great for a freshman, I really do. I think he is doing terrific. I want to see him run the floor better. I want to see him where he makes moves and get above the rim. He does when he dunks it I want to see him make his hook shot and his moves. I want to see him get above the rim. I want to see him rebound quicker; I want to see him challenge shots better. He challenges low-- TJ and George challenge high. So that's the good thing about Samardo. I am extremely impressed that he is a freshman and he has got so much improvement. All the freshman are going to get a lot better. Swopshire is going to get stronger and better, (Kyle) Kuric is going to get better. They're all going to improve, it is a very good class.
Lamar Head Coach Steve Roccaforte
"I think they have a really good team. They're number nine in the country for a reason. They play with a lot of energy. They do a lot of things and they put a lot of pressure on you. We had a hard time executing on offense with their pressure. We couldn't pressure them very well we tried various traps and pressures. A couple of times coming out of timeouts and they got layups off it. It kinda limits what you can do. So we sat back in the second half and played a 2-3 zone for the majority of the second half. I thought our guys played hard from start to finish but we really couldn't get anything going. They are very good."
(On difference between Louisville and UK) "They are very different styles of play. I have seen Rick Pitino's teams before because I was at the University of Memphis. You know they trap and run, they are long and athletic and I thought Kentucky was long and athletic. I think Louisville right now has better guard play and they are a lot deeper. But they are a lot deeper than most teams. Most people don't play more than eight or nine guys and they keep running guys at you, pressing and running. It makes it very tough when they go back in the zone because they long."
(On feeling of team after today's loss) "Not very good. Not very good at all. To be honest with you, when we put this trip together we play four games in six days you think if you go 2-2 it's a terrific trip. We had our opportunity last night to go 2-2. You have an eight point lead with eight minutes to go and you don't score a field goal you don't deserve to win the game. We didn't deserve to win last night and we certainly didn't deserve to win today. It's just disappointing. We had it set up the right way and every opportunity to go 2-2 and that would have been a terrific trip for us going home to play Texas Tech.
(On preparing for Louisville) "It is probably impossible. We spent all our time working on us. We knew they were going to press and trap. We knew their personnel we planned against what we thought they were gonna do. But it's hard to duplicate that with your team as compared to what they have. It's very hard to prepare for especially in one day in one night."
