Louisville vs. Pittsburgh

Louisville Head Coach Rick Pitino
(Opening Statement) "Well, it was the tale of two halves. We played a brilliant first half. We got constantly beat off the dribble in the second half. We constantly backed up and let them have threes. Sometimes somebody is 10-15 feet behind the line and yes, he is and that is how you win games by not guarding people 15 feet behind the line. So great first half. This team of mine is fundamentally not sound. We are a rebuilding team this year because of a lot of reasons many of which are their fault. But when we say rebuilding, we want to rebuild this year. So we really have to focus in on the fundamentals and stop getting beat on the first bounce, where we have to rotate out of weakness. If you get beat on the third bounce, that is something but I am real disappointed in the second half defense, real disappointed about the way we attacked the 1-3-1 defense. Quentin Snider doesn't normally back up like that and then he took them and ended the game – so that was good. Give a lot of credit to Jamel Artis, he is a terrific basketball player – 43 points is an awesome performance.

(Is it that position) "Well, Mangok [Mathiang] and Jaylen [Johnson] got beat in the corner, just on one bounce right to the basket, by a 6-10 pivot player. Donovan [Mitchell] got beat all night. It's all the guys, and they've just got to work a little bit harder. Now, we played zone in the first half and camouflaged a lot of weaknesses. We didn't want to play man in this game, but some of the nuances, when they changed to man, we would have dissected it. With other teams, we would have switched it right away and done a lot of good things, but this team can have a difficult time picking up changes. We're excited about the win now. A guy has 43 points, and we still win. We're excited. I told somebody on the radio, today, that if you look at our statistics and you take the name 'Louisville' off, and you say 'What's this team's record?' If you look at the foul line, if you look at the shooting percentages, and you say what's this team? You'd say 'They're winning six or seven games, max.' We're 14-3, 2-2 and both with a very, very tough schedule, a top five schedule in the nation. We're very happy with the record, but we don't want to rebuild to next year. We want to rebuild to this year, and we've got to improve fundamentally."

(About building up to a 26 point lead on a good team.) "We just played awesome defense. We confused them. We played good defense like passed teams and then they made some adjustments and our guys couldn't mentally make the adjustments and guard them correctly. Then we kept backing up in transition and giving them very tough threes, but he is on fire. He was putting on a Steph Curry performance, so if you are guarding Steph Curry you have to guard him right when he crosses half court. Make sense? I mean David (Levitch) tried to give me an intelligent answer and he said 'he's 20 feet behind the line.' I said 'that is a little bit of an exaggeration, but I told you to guard him when he crosses half court.' He didn't know how to answer.

(About how in first half the offense seemed to be a lot more patient taking good shots) Well, they played 1-3-1 in the second half and that's what bothered us, but Quentin usually eats up the 1-3-1 and he didn't do it until late. The way this team switches, the five films I watched, this team didn't allow one basketball team to run an offensive set because it switching and life like set. So we were just going to create a lot of motion, a lot of movement, cut and attack the paint and they did a great job. Kevin is an terrific coach, they switched to a 1-3-1. With a 1-3-1, we go on our heels and we didn't drive to the lane again and dish. So that hurt us in 1-3-1 and was a good adjustment by them. We didn't attack it like we did the man-to-man. The first half, we had a brilliant performance defensively, brilliant performance offensively. Second half, very poor performance from both ends of the floor.

(What does a game like this take out of the coach?) "I look like Tony Montana, (from Scarface) don't I? I'm sweating. My underwear is soaked, everything. It's very difficult coaching this group of guys, but it's one of the more enjoyable things. It's very difficult because they're a bunch of really good athletes who care, but they're not really good basketball players, yet. The fundamentals of basketball they've got to learn ... just simple ball faking, if I want to pass over here, then I'm going ball fake here, I'm not going to look at you and pass to you. Just little things that we've got to get better at. It's about eight or 10 little things that when we get that we're going to improve dramatically. Just like Tony Hicks, Tony Hicks can help us, but we always tell him against a 1-3-1 the sideline is your enemy. Stay off the sideline. He went right to the sideline and turned it over. Those are things we'll get better at. We'll keep harping on. We don't have a whole lot of time with Duke coming in here and the type of schedule we play, but we'll keep working at it. I'm very, very lucky in the fact that they may be good athletes, but they also just want to learn. They want to get better. They want to give a lot of hustle to our basketball team, but we've got to work on the fundamentals to improve. We've got a big game coming up against Duke. We know that. We know they can shoot the ball at a lot of different positions. Once we learn the fundamentals, we won't be as offensive challenged. Like I told our guys, you shoot an air ball, if I was you, I can't bring you to the gym anymore because of 20 hours, I'd put a cot in the gym before I'd shoot an air ball. A few guys who shot an air ball …. it wasn't breezy in there. You need to get in the gym, and you need to shoot free throws because a free throw is very easy. These guys and… I hope… I'm going to sleep in the office tonight, and I hope they're in the gym as well. I'm going to go change my shirt."

Pittsburgh Head Coach Kevin Stallings
(Opening statement) "Obviously the story for us, unfortunately, was the first half, again. Played a poor first half on both ends and they played well obviously and that was more than we could recover from. I thought we did some nice things in the second half… Incredible performance by Jamel Artis. I thought that we found a way to finally become the aggressor, which is kind of a challenge anytime you play a team like Louisville is you have to find a way to become the aggressor and we found that a little bit after halftime. But it wasn't enough. We've got to do a better job in some areas, but our guys hung in there and they kept playing and I'm certainly proud of them for that."

(Did the struggles on defense carry over to struggles on offense) "They did something that they really haven't done most of the year. They pressed differently and they were playing some zone and then going man in the middle of the possession and they hadn't done a lot of that. We actually practiced against that - we anticipated that they might. And unfortunately, I didn't think that our movement and our cutting was what it needed to be. We stood and waited on the ball to come to us instead of exploiting holes and putting them at disadvantages. You've got to give them credit. They're obviously a very good team. They're very long - their length is really formidable. We'll just have figure out a better way to play the next time we play them, I guess."

(What made Jamel Artis so effective tonight) "Well, he's good, that's one thing. He's just a good player and he's very skilled. He's got great size. He's completely unaffected by any environment. He's just got a lot of competitiveness to him and a lot of toughness to him as it pertains to that. None of us are surprised to see him play really well and that was impressive, I thought."

(Did you notice any common threads between this game and the Syracuse game?) "Yeah, we weren't good on offense and we weren't good on defense. Those were the commonalities in both games. We had trouble running good offense. We got hurt in transition a few times. We got hurt on the boards a few times and they made some shots. I thought we played better defensively in the second half and I thought we played with a little more aggression. Again, you have to try to find a way, when you play a team like them, to become the aggressor. We were able to do that for much of the second half but that wasn't enough."

(What was the adjustment you made in the second half offensively that really made a difference?) "We started driving the ball a little bit more. We got them into some fouls and when we got to line if we'd made some free throws, it might have been a good game. We got to the bonus pretty early. We got to the double bonus pretty early and drove the ball. And instead of being tentative or casual, we were aggressive and assertive and that made a big difference."

(With the league being so tough this year, how do you get the team to refocus?) "It's like this every night. We have to play good or better. You can't play average and win in this league, we can't. There's 18 of them and you can't dwell on a win, you can't dwell on a loss. I know that sounds like coach-speak. Players are generally a little better at that than coaches are. We play Miami Saturday at noon, we have no time. We have to try to figure out why we didn't play better in the first half and try to be better on Saturday."

(Was it an energy thing?) "No, we were playing pretty hard, they were just better than us. They were just playing better and I thought some good looks early in the game. I thought the first 10 minutes of the game I thought we had some pretty good looks. Cam (Johnson) had a couple , Mike (Young) had a couple, Sheldon (Jeter) had a couple – the only one that really consistently threw it in until later in the game was Jamel (Artis). Then Mike (Young) made some there in the second half."

(Was this just an off-night for Michael Young?) "Yeah, it wasn't Mike's best night, but it probably wasn't going to be anybody's best night the way Jamel (Artis) was going. Mike was fine. Mike played hard, he competed, played hard on defense. They're long – I don't know if their length bothered us, bothered him. I don't really know, but certainly they did a good job on him. They did a good job on all of us, really – especially in the first half."

(What do you take away from a game like this where you play well for a large stretch and in some ways kind of control the game, but ultimately end with a loss?) "Again, you have to be consistent. And we talked about this in the nonconference postgame press conferences when I talked about needing to play closer to 40 minutes and it was good enough for us to win most of our nonconference games, but that's not the way it is in this league. So we just have to be more consistent. But again, the way Syracuse shot the ball on Saturday, I'm not sure that anyone would have beaten them. I would have liked to have seen our defense make them miss a little bit more, but the way they shot the ball, seriously I don't think anybody in the league would have beaten them that day. Not a lot of people are going to come in here and win – they're just not, so I'm not all up in arms about the fact that we lost a couple of games on the road when we didn't play well. We have to continue to do better, we knew that. We're not a finished product, we know that too. But our guys battle and our guys do play hard. They do keep competing, so… we've got 14 [games]left. We'll play the next one Saturday and count them up at the end and hope we did well enough."

University of Louisville Athletics

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Tony Hicks

Quentin Snider

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