Syracuse at Louisville Postgame Quotes

University of Louisville Head coach Chris Mack

(Opening Statement) "I'm proud of our group. I told them they won tonight's game with their attitude and mentality on Sunday night, Monday and Tuesday. They have one another. They were playing for one another. I liked the way we executed against Syracuse's zone. It was a big factor of getting the shots that we got. In the first half, we squandered away a few opportunities around the basket with our big guys, but they made the most of their chance in the second half. We have Ryan (McMahon) and Jordan (Nwora) on the floor. Dwayne (Sutton) shooting the ball like he did tonight. It's hard to keep that zone very compact. Very fortunately, I think the guys that can shoot the ball. We made so many better plays at the high post this year as opposed to a year ago. I was joking with Dale. We didn't change a whole lot. We didn't grow smarter in the last year, maybe in some things but not against zone offense. We were surer with our decisions. We got the ball there and we finished. We made 12-foot pull ups. We dumped the ball down to Malik (Williams) and Steve (Enoch). We threw it back behind a couple times to the top of the key. It was a good offense. Defensively, they're a challenge, they are a big challenge and I think they're not going to be many teams, I don't think, that will hold those three scorers. I'm talking about Girard (Joseph Girard III), Boeheim (Buddy Boeheim), and Hughes (Elijah Hughes) to under 50% each. There were a handful of guys that were on the fence. We move on to Carolina. I don't care how many they've lost in a row. A few of them, I'm sure Roy didn't know how they lost. They have talent, and they're finally healthy. They are going to come in here ready to play on Saturday and we need to be ready to play as well."

(What was the main difference that you saw with Steven and Malik in the second half as opposed to the first?)"Finished through traffic when they got fouled. Steve caught the ball with readiness sometimes. I thought Sam (Williamson) made some excellent passes in the first half. David made a few. It's attacking the ball by catching on my back foot going backwards you're giving the defense a chance to get back into the play. If you're attacking the ball, if you're stepping into the pass when you're on the baseline, then you're going to at least get on the rim quicker and be able to finish. That's the biggest difference that I saw."

(Can you go into a little detail about how you landed on tonight's starters and just, how were they able to take control of the game early.) "Well, Ryan was more of a matchup. In terms of like they're going to play zone. There was no 'Hey, I wonder if they'll come out man' they're going to play 40 minutes of zone. And I joked with coach Boeheim before the game, I said 90% of what I have on this play card, you've taken off the docket. So Ryan was in because of that. Dave, and I've said this, he's our best playermaker. He's a freshman, and got winded a little bit. But he is our best playmaker, so that was a change that we've been contemplating for a while. And, you know, Malik's our biggest energy giver. He's our best defensive player. He's a talker. And so when I lose with Fresh when he goes out of the game, I know people outside of our locker room don't appreciate it, but I certainly do, is you lose a voice, the guy's a terrific defender, and that's what Malik is in different positions. And I want to score 90 points, every night but I don't want to give up 90 points. And so we have to make sure that our defense is strong to start the game."

(You've said you sound like a broken record when you're talking about Dwayne and his effort all season, but when he shoots it like that - and he's not really known as a great shooter - but he is a very good three-point shooter. And when he does, it makes you a different team.) "Yeah, he totally does. He shot the ball with confidence. You could tell that Syracuse was really tilting the floor toward Ryan and Jordan, and the one-more pass was finding Dwayne a lot. It's really good to see a senior that confident in who he is as a player. He does everything else. At times he won't even take three-point shots and just goes for the offensive rebound. He's invaluable to our team and it was great to see him knock some down. It just makes it that much harder for Syracuse to defend us."

(In terms of shot selections in Jordan's shot selection, he wasn't knocking down threes early, but were you happy with the kind of shots he was creating inside and outside the arch?)
"I thought he created some things that were to the foul line, which I thought were good shots. We don't want to just settle for threes. We didn't want to come to halftime with 24 threes attempted. I thought he mixed it up. Guys ran at him, which they're going to do, and I thought he put it on the floor a couple of times and had 15-foot pull-ups, which I'll take that shot every day of the week. They're going to tilt the floor toward him, but we need him to shoot more than 10 shots a game. Sometimes it's more difficult when teams are in man and they do not leave him. They don't help on his screens and they just don't leave him. We knew that he would find some openings tonight, and a couple of them didn't go in. What I was most pleased with was what I've been asking Jordan to do, and that is just affect the games in other areas, and he really did that tonight."

(On a season high 23 assists) "Absolutely. I think we ran that action one time and it resulted in an air ball. There's different ways to attack it but ultimately you want to get the ball to the high post and make the decisions from there. You want to get it to the short corner, make quicker decisions, because you're going to get trapped. You want to get two guys to play you so you can free up a teammate. You're going to have a high assist night when you make shots, just simply because you're not doing a whole lot off the dribble against the zone."

(On quicker ball movement) "You probably get a little bit mesmerized. He's a great playmaker. I wouldn't have recruited him, and I believed in him when a lot of people didn't. So, I appreciated David when he was a sophomore in high school, a junior in high school, or a senior in high school. You can ask Mike Szabo on that one. I was recruiting my tail off for him at Xavier. It was funny because, we play Carolina on Saturday and Xavier plays Villanova. Two years ago, David was all set to come to the Villanova/Xavier game. And then, I got a text from him about an hour and a half before the game and he said, 'Coach I can't make it tonight I got something else going on.' And then I found out later that he was at the Louisville/North Carolina game. It really pissed me off. That's why I never started him until tonight.

(On the starting lineup going forward) "Probably not. Ryan doesn't change expressions when you bring him off the bench or start him. It will depend on matchups. I do anticipate David being our starter moving forward, Malik as well. I'm not really sure what I'm going to do beyond that."

(On what they did to shut down Buddy Boeheim) "It's hard. He does a really good job of using screens. We were trying to make sure that we had two on the ball when he came off the screens. Whoever was screening for him, primarily a four or a five for them, our defender needed to really show as he was making that catch. If you go under his screen he's going to bump back. He has a really quick release. A really quick release and it helps because he's 6'6 I believe. Coming into the game we wanted to be a less gap oriented and a little bit more man centric than we're used to. I thought that helped be there on the catch a little bit, which I think you have to do with those guys."

Syracuse Head coach Jim Boeheim

(Opening statement) "I think we were good in the first half except for (Ryan) McMahon. Joe (Girard III) left him once, Buddy (Boeheim) left him once, Elijah (Hughes) once and Quincy (Gurrier) once; so the one thing we want to do in the first half was not to let McMahon get free and that was the difference in the half. The second half, our guards did a better job, we found him better, but we didn't rotate and take away the inside play, and that was it. That was the game. They just got to many easy shots down there. Our defense was good the whole game. I thought their defense was just better than our offense. I think they're a really good team. I think they've got a chance to beat anybody, and tonight we just weren't good enough in the second half defensively or offensively."

(What would you attribute Elijah Hughes' struggle to tonight?) "I thought they did a good job on him defensively, they just did. They made it hard for him to get by, and they just did a good job on him and Joe, they did a really good job on both of them. On Marek (Dolezaj) same thing, I thought they just did a good job defensively on those guys. The disappointment was our defensive breakdown in the second half. I think that was the one thing that was disappointing about the game. They're good, they're probably going to win a lot of games in here. I think we have obviously played very well. We played very well on the road, we played better on the road than we have at home overall. We just didn't have it tonight in the second half, especially. They were pressuring, we just couldn't really get by, and make a play."

"A lot of stuff has been written and said… we're not tired. We don't have a tired guy out there. We're not good enough at the end of the game, in the games we've lost, to win. That's the bottom line. I wish we were better. I wish we were doing something wrong that we can correct, but we're just not quite good enough. These guys have fought hard. To go down to the wire at Florida State and Clemson, and to win the four road games that we won, I think is a tremendous tribute to this team what they've done. We're young. We're still making some mistakes we can't make on both ends of the court. Obviously Bourama (Sidibe) and Marek, are getting in bad foul trouble. That's not something that's going to help us. They fought very hard. The reason we aren't winning at the end of games is we're not good enough. Sometimes that's just the case. I think we played better in certain games at the end, and have won of those games we played in. This group's played hard, they're trying to do everything they can to win games. I'm confident that they will be ready to play and play hard the rest of the way, but we just haven't been quite good enough. Tonight was a big example of that inside, we just couldn't handle them inside in the second half and their defense was just good, better than our offense was. I think they're a top team, top 10, wherever you want to put them and we're not. It's pretty simple really."

(This was David Johnson's first start for them, how do you see him impacting them?) "I've seen him a lot, I think he's a good player. The guys that concerned us were Jordan Nwora and Ryan McMahon and their big guys down inside. Those were the guys that concerned me. Again, David Johnson, I've seen him this year and I've seen him do some good things, but he is not a guy that I'm concerned about in our zone. I'm concerned about those big guys, Nwora, McMahon.

(This is the first game in about three months that your team wasn't in, so what do you tell your players after this one? Especially with five games left?) "Get ready for the next game. This is not rocket science. There is nothing about this game. They're going to play 31 games this year and we're going to try and play all 31. You're going to have a bad game. Every team, basically, in the country is going to have one. Unless, you're Baylor, maybe Kansas or some of those three or four teams that maybe haven't. But everybody else is going to have a game or two where they aren't there. This team, I think, in the league, has been as competitive in the league as I could ask them to be. We are not good in the middle. We have trouble with big guys. The reason we lost our non-conference games is we give big guys, pretty much around 24 and 10 every game. We can't handle those guys. We play good at all the other positions and battled all year and will battle. I don't know what will happen, but we will battle every game regardless of who we play. After a slow start tonight, we battled back, hung in there for a while. But their defense just took us out of what we were trying to do in the second half. The shots we got, we didn't make and they hurt us inside. "

(After the games in Brooklyn, you said that it would take this team 15 to 20 games to reach its full potential. You're at 26 now; how do you think the team is doing?) "I think we've played pretty well overall since the conference started. We've done what we can do. We're in the middle of having seven wins and there's about eight teams already with six or seven wins, something like that. We're right in that group. We're not better than that, we're not worse than that. We're right there, that's where we are. And I think they're playing about as well as they can play, given the resources that we have and the players that we have. I think they've had some incredible games. Florida State, we had every opportunity to win the game. Clemson we had every opportunity to win. Those are good teams and tough to beat at home and they got away right at the end. They didn't get away because we were tired. They didn't get away because we don't have enough guys. We have more than enough guys. We just haven't quite been able to get the stops we've needed to at the end of games and that's something we work on every day and try to get better. We're just not there yet, and I don't know if we'll get there but we're going to keep trying."

(With the way they were guarding your three primary scorers, is there a way to get anything out of your other two positions?) "We threw it to Marek and he was 0-for-1 and had a couple turnovers and we threw it to Quincy and he turned it over twice and in the offense is off the boards, that's where he catches it and puts it in, that's where he's good. We can't throw to these guys on the inside. We don't have the post presence. So we're working with the perimeter guys to try to establish our offense from there. And our offense is pretty good, one of the better offensive teams in the league.

Let's see, we played 26 games and we had 25 pretty good games and tonight wasn't one of them. We're doing what we can do to win the games. That's what we are doing. We're going to do that every game. Period. When you start putting in print that they 'scored 25 percent against the zone against Buddy or 25 percent against this guy'. I'm telling you right now, no one in this room or KenPom, nobody knows who is at fault when somebody scores on us. No one knows. Not one person. Because it's how we're playing the zone at that time, we may have the center up so if it gets down there it's not the center's fault if they score inside. If we have the center back and they score down there it's the center's fault. But if they score in the corner, it could be the forward, it could be the guard, it could be the center. There's no way to pinpoint who's at fault in our defense. Even when I look at it, it's hard sometimes, because there's certain movements, certain plays, and certain situations that there's really not any fault. It's just that they got a shot that we couldn't defend. That happens. In any defense but especially in zones. But, to think that somebody knows who's at fault when somebody scores against our zone is the craziest thing. I've never heard this until this year. I've been in this a long time. I think I know a little bit about this game. I've never heard 'well this guy's 25 percent responsible and this guy's 35 percent responsible.' Are you kidding me? I'm telling you, I could get a kindergartner who could tell you better than they could tell you."

University of Louisville Athletics

Players Mentioned

David Johnson

Ryan McMahon

Jordan Nwora

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