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University of Louisville Men's Basketball Post-Game Quotes
February 01, 2010 | Men's Basketball
Feb. 1, 2010
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Louisville Head Coach Rick Pitino
(Opening Statement) "I think the true character of a personality of a ball club is not how you have fallen but how you get up. I think our team had great character tonight defensively they way we played. I thought we played brilliantly, we picked ourselves up off the mat after three really discouraging losses and play good basketball. It was fun to see that. Not hanging their heads because UConn is a very tough ball club. They remind me of Kentucky in terms of the way the break and in terms of the way they are impossible to stop. I thought our team was very aggressive and did a lot of great things on offense. We had to battle huge foul trouble and got a huge lift from Stephan Van Treese in the ball game. I didn't expect to play him but he gave us a big lift."
(Did coach see the win coming) "I just kept telling them that character is judged not how you fall but how you get up. So you will be judged by this game not the game you just lost. We have to take accountability. We lost a game and that is it."
(Edgar's 8 assists) "He has been distributing all year. I think a lot of the time the guys get fouled and he doesn't get the assist. I think he has been doing that all year. Swop played really terrific and really competed. I thought all the guys, they all played terrific. Jerry was great in the first half."
(About Swop and Jerry) "Swop passed up shots and if you are drive what you need to do is pass and not get caught up in the air. If you are driving against UConn it is the next pass. I think Jerry's so-called shooting woes in his mind allowed him to be a better basketball player because it got him very aggressive driving the basketball. He will still be able to shoot, but this takes his game to the next dimension. Always looking to drive and ball fake and sometimes you get a good off a problem and that was his case."
(Improved perimeter shooting) "Taking good shots and Peyton Siva took a challenged three in the corner and good ball movement and we had to change our offense drastically. With TJ and Samarado we had to go to three-four-five new sets. Abandoning the old sets is not easy to do. The guys did a good job of executing that."
(About seven guys making threes) "That is right. We had good shots and good ball movement. We had heart and that is what you want to see when you come out. In you get in as many wars and you come up with a clunker. then it was easy to do that but we didn't."
(About Van Treese in the game) "I was very nervous at that point about Stephan Van Treese but it wouldn't have happened if we hadn't been playing two bigs and where he was on the sidelines everyday in practice he is now playing the entire practice because he isn't because he has to be the other team's five man. So he hasn't sat in two weeks and earned a lot of playing time. I think he ran everything well, ran well and blocked out. He has good hands. (What did you say to SVT) I didn't say anything I was just nauseous (with a wink)."
(Important win mentally and physically?) "Our team knows we are playing well. You take Pitt to the wire , Seton Hall to the wire and WVU to the wire and on the road and you know you are playing good basketball regardless of the disappointing outcome. It is unfortunate that we didn't convert them to wins. But we are playing good basketball."
(Bracketology) "I look at the RPI. I think we were 44-46 and they are 48 and we have identical records. We had the fifth toughest schedule in the nation. They have the third or second toughest schedule in the nation ... I looked at that so closely. So if I know we are close. I don't look at Bracketology, but Joe Lunardi is always on the money a lot. We got to play our way in. Right now we aren't going to get any help along the way because we are playing good basketball. Right now we should be 6-3 in conference and 16-6 overall but we are not. We just have to take accountability for it and move forward."
(Key stretch in the game ) "We played great defense in the first half and had 25 deflections and in the second half our ball pressure was terrible. We only had four deflections in ten minutes of play. They are an interesting transition team. If you don't stop them with all five guys, they keep driving unless they get fouled. We kind of broke the statistics because in most games they win when they shoot more free throws and tonight was the exception. Our defense was great in the first half and the free throw disparity was incredible. I think they shot 25 percent. They are so tough to guard because they are so great off the bounce."
"I thought they played excellent half court offense. I think Jerry is playing very good basketball I thought he did some smart things. he has some very good moves and but he has learn to put It on the floor and make against Connecticut. They have led the league in blocked shots for eight years in a row. Our guys played very intelligent half court basketball and that is what we had to do tonight. We needed to go up and down like a ping pong match even though we scored 48 points. Because very few teams can run up and down the court with them the way that Kentucky did with them at the garden. It was anybody's game. Teams that run them usually die."
(Harder in this league to maintain a good seed) "We are playing good basketball right now even in our losses we have played good basketball. Early in the year we were really banged up and we played the game without three key players. They came back after no practice. Now we are healthy and playing good basketball. We have to play our way into it. So does UConn, so does Cincinnati, St. John's ... the whole league does. We played Villanova to the wire. We played Pitt to the wire and then some. And WVU and then some. I feel like killing myself right now."
Connecticut Head Coach George Blaney
(Opening Statement) "I told Rick after the game that they played the best offense they've played all year; at least the games I've seen them in. I've seen them a bunch of times. I thought they ran at full speed and really gave us trouble with the flare screen and certainly Sosa and Smith with their penetration and the kick outs to the corner caused us a great deal of trouble. We kind of adjusted a little bit and started containing a little bit better. We made a great run and got it back to seven with nine minutes to go. We seemed to run out of gas. I think we had made 13 field goals up until that point and we made one field goal over the last nine minutes. Some of the basic mistakes that we made with the 18 turnovers were just killing us. It's hard to understand some of the missed foul shots. Two rebounds go out of bounds off of our hands. We were able to penetrate and had two guys open and neither of them knew whether the ball was coming to them and it was a turnover. It was just really basic things that got us in trouble. We continue to show heart and be able to come back where we want to be and look like you're going to be able to overcome it. They were a little shaky at that point too. They've run some tough games themselves and have blown some leads themselves. We thought we were making a pretty good run and we just needed to have a couple more good possessions of solid basketball. Certainly Stanley Robinson with 11 rebounds and 14 points and Jerome had a real strong second half. Kemba Walker continued to play good although he didn't shoot the ball very well. Gavin Edwards has been a rock all year for us."
(On foul trouble in the first half) "The foul trouble hurt us badly in the first half because we had to sit guys so long. We didn't get much production from the bench. Jerome Dyson had to sit a long time and I had to play Kemba Walker with two fouls the whole time. He played 40 minutes."
(On the game being tough for big guys to adjust to being called that way) "It was called both ways. We don't normally foul and they're a team that normally does foul. It was a physical game. They kept going to the rim a lot except for the threes. So I'm sure we were fouling them. I thought maybe Ater Majok had a block in the second half; at least one of them was a little bit better. He might not have had two fouls."
(Do you worry about not getting rewarded for playing hard?) "Yes, you worry about that a lot because it erodes your confidence. After riding so high with the St. John's game and the Texas game where they just felt so good about themselves. They knew at that point that they were good. And we are good, we're just not playing very well. We really need to get that confidence back and stop turning the ball over. That continues to be the major problem with us."
(What needs to happen to turn it around?) "We need a little bit more discipline without turning the ball over. Yes certainly a win would help, but we need to make sure that we play better basketball. We can't be giving a team that many more possessions, especially a team that runs good offense."
(On lack of bench scoring) "We didn't get any scoring from the bench. Gavin really isn't a bench player. It'll go in the books as getting 13 points from him. He's playing 37 minutes, - he's not a bench player. Literally we got one point from the bench. We've got to get some help from the bench."
(On talking to the team in the locker room) "I do a lot of talking. Jim Calhoun and I try to use the past with other players and other teams. We talk about how they handle things and how they would do things and what different teams would do in different situations. I talked tonight about playing in Freedom Hall. It's a cathedral. Its one of the great places in America to play basketball and we should be ready to play. It is a privilege to play here. That is what we do. We try to talk to them a lot about how we're going to get better. We can't do anything about tonight right now. We need to worry about the next game."
(On looking to the future and tournament play) "We talked about how before this game we had ten games left and we needed to do some business in those ten games. We'll talk again about how we have nine games left and how we need to do some business."
