Louisville vs. Miami

February 11, 2017 | Men's Basketball

Postgame Quotes

By: Kim Pemberton

Louisville Head Coach Rick Pitino

(Opening Statement) "I've experienced this situation so much in my life, pros as well as college. I remember so well, as if it's yesterday, Bernard King goes down with an ankle injury, and we just lost two in a row. I'll never forget this. Joe Namath and Jerry Buss come in the locker room, and they bet with Hubie [Brown]. I'm listening to it. They have Magic [Johnson] out. We have Bernard King out, in their prime. We have another starter out and another who can't play. He's injured. We overachieve so much in the next two games, we win. Now, we come back on a great road trip, come home. We get everybody back, including Bernard, the leading scorer in the league, and we lose two of the next three because everybody now says 'oh we got our great players back', and you don't play well. I was afraid of that going into this game because I've experienced it so much. We've been over achieving beyond any of our imaginations. Tonight, Miami said we're going to pick certain guys out, create movement, and we're going to drive on that guy. We're going to take that guy. I've been telling all of you all along that we're a weak defensive team. I think tonight was the final straw for our players to see it. Then when we went match-up zone they kept losing and not doing the right things because they're having a difficult time picking it up. This was a great lesson. The last thing I'll say about it is 95-90 percent of the teams lose this game. You don't win this game because they totally outplayed us. They were the better basketball team tonight, but we showed incredible character to win this game. We're real proud of that, probably our best game of the season in terms of character because we didn't have it tonight in any phase of the game. Three or four of our guys didn't play physical. We let them go by us on straight line drives. We didn't rebound well. We didn't shoot well. We didn't pass well. But then when the game was on the line we did all of the above."

(On Quentin's first game back) "He did okay. He's just got to get better defensively. When I tried to start Ryan [McMahon] to get some offense in, they immediately went right at him. We've just got to get better at the defensive end. Q (Quentin Snider) looked good in practice. David's (Levitch) been playing weak defense in practice and fouling too much. He did in the Virginia game too much. He's got to get out of that habit because we need him. We need him to play because he's got a lot of savvy to him."

(On Miami attacking the switches) "Well they didn't attack the switches, they slipped and that hurt. We wanted our guys to stay with the man on the slip. So you never set it. We were looking switch and the guy would roll and he'd be wide open. Again that's an experience we said go with your guy, stay with your guy if his feet stop, switch. If his feet keep moving don't and feet weren't moving.
(On Deng Adel and Mangok Mathiang response to this game) "Mangok has been playing great basketball period so he didn't have to respond. That's the way he's been playing. Anas Mahmoud had two weeks of really, really poor practices and you can see he's not playing really well. Ray (Spalding), VJ (King), all of them become more physical. They don't understand what's at stake for Miami. They don't understand what's at stake when you go to Syracuse. They don't understand because they have never been there except for Quentin, what it means to these teams. We have been there before when we had to win six out of eight to go to the tournament and the just don't understand what they are up against. Tonight was a good lesson for them to learn."

(What sparked that thirteen to nothing run?)"Good defense, good rebounding, ball containment and very good offense, passing, passing! I thought the key to the game although Deng and Mangok played, I think Jaylen Johnson made the great lunch-pail plays when we needed him."

(15 years in a row winning 20 games) "This year means more than any other year because of this team and the schedule we play. The schedule we play this year was early on; we even took the teams that we thought would have a high RPI coming back but when you play Purdue and Kentucky and Baylor and Wichita State and Indiana at full speed and you win 20 games it's impressive. We just have to get better defensively. We have to get better in our zone because you can see on man who they are trying to go at and we can't let that happen."

(Projection has you as the No. 2 seed, are you aware of that?) "Yeah, Kenny (Klein) shows me everything when it happens. Kenny is the antithesis of the press secretary… That's not very nice. I just think it's good this time of year. But, look. If we play the type of defense we played tonight or we'll get knocked out in the first round. So, as a coaching staff, we've got to get our players to hone in on the match-up zone, hone in on our defense. Now it is tough to rotate against this basketball team because they'll put four shooters on the floor at a time so it's tough. But, Syracuse shoots the ball great so we've got to be ready for that."

(When [Quentin] was out, was he able to work on shots) "Yeah, after eight or nine days he started working on his shot. Now I texted him last night because, I thought about it, David Levitch wasn't playing good defense in practice, so I wasn't losing defense by playing Q (Quentin Snider). I just texted him and said, 'you ready to start?'. And he said, ' yep, I'm ready'. I said, 'do you want to?', because sometimes they are 'ehh.' He gave me the thumb up and I said, 'okay, you're starting tomorrow'. You know he was a little off in the first half, but that's to be expected. He looked good in practice for three days."

(On Jaylen, Quentin, Adel, and Snider playing together well) "Yeah, we've got to get VJ King to pass the ball. We've got to get him to play more physical along with Anas (Mahmoud) and Ray (Spalding) because we are going to need those guys. It's tough because passing is such an important element. If you only see one side of the floor it hurts you as a basketball team. I thought the guys worked very well together. And I think we've got a few weeks to work on our defense. We'll have it by the time the tournament starts. We'll get it. We'll get it because the character of this ball club. I'm not overly worried about it. But tonight it shows them what I've been saying, 'everybody's abandoning their offense, they're just taking us off the bounce. So we'll get it though. I'm positive about that."

Miami Head Coach Jim Larranaga

(Opening Statement) "Well, I thought that was a really terrific college basketball game. I thought our guys played hard and well for a very long stretch. I thought Louisville, when they fell behind early, really dug down deep. Started the second half with three baskets off of offensive rebounds, which has really been a strength of ours keeping people off the glass, but they're very good at that and that got them back. It kind of see-sawed for a while and they finished a little stronger than we did."

(On Miami's zone causing offensive struggles for Louisville) "For 95 percent of the season, we have played man-to-man, almost exclusively. Only as this season has worn on have we adjusted and added a couple of zone defenses - we had them early in the season, but never used them. But you need them as you face the different teams in the ACC with very short turn-around, and we played on Wednesday night, we were exhausted after the game, the guys played so hard. We had a walk through on Thursday, so we really needed to make the game preparation very, very simple, and we used the zone effectively on Wednesday, so we just decided to stay with it. I thought the difference is in the second half was we still made them miss early on, but they got those second chance points and we would've preferred they didn't."

(On seeing the fan rushing the court rush) "Basically no, but there was a little bit of a commotion in our huddle and I glanced up and there was someone there, I believe in red, and we don't normally wear red. I had asked the coach and they just said it was some fan. Is that right? Was it some fan? It wasn't a Miami fan."

(Success attacking Louisville's switching defense) "Part of your offensive scheme's is to create certain situations over and over again. It is up to the players to recognize how the opponent is defending and then attack that. So if they're switching, if they're trapping, if they're clogging, we have all different terms and we tell the players this is what you can anticipate them doing. I thought early in the game we were very, very good at catching the guy who was rolling to the basket. Kamari Murphy got a couple of baskets, Dewan Huell got a nice little jump hook, Ebuka Izundu got a basket off of it too. That was very helpful to us to get those inside baskets off of good passing, but as the game wore on, their defense got harder to get inside and we ended up having to shoot more perimeter shots. I thought one of the major keys to the game was their defense on Davon Reed. They really shadowed him and we weren't able to get him open very often and I saw Coach Pitino stand up one time when we drove baseline and kicked it to Davon for a wide open three and he was barking at whoever it was, I don't know the player, to not leave Davon so that was obviously a major part of their defensive strategy and it worked. We had a hard time getting him free."

(On how impressive and deep the ACC is in basketball) "It is. The league is a monster. I look at our schedule, we are on the road, today at Louisville. We got to go to Virginia, to Florida State, that's three of the top ten teams in the country. They will probably be seeded 1, 2, 3 in the NCAA Tournament. We have a home game, Georgia Tech, Clemson, Duke, and then have to go on the road also to Virginia Tech. Our schedule is murder, but everybody else in the league looks at their schedule and knows that if you don't play really well, you are going to lose. If you play really well, then you have a chance, but the other team is probably going to play really well, like today. I thought the game was in doubt right up until the last minute. I mean we did fall behind by, was it six? We fell behind by eight, but then it was all of a sudden, what two again, or three? Tied? So you see, I don't know, I wasn't paying much attention. But that's the game that these players are so darn good. I love my team. The guys on my team are getting better. We weren't this good back in November and December, but now we put ourselves in a position, I think if we even made a couple more free throws, it would've tightened it and maybe even given us a chance to make a shot right at the end."

(On preparing and anticipating Quentin Snider's return) "It seems like every time we play a team that had a hurt player, he was back against us. Amile Jefferson from Duke, this year. A couple years back we played Duke when Ryan Kelly was out for six weeks. He came back and scored 36 on us. In his first game back and he hadn't even practiced. I'm just happy Quentin (Snider) didn't get 36 today."