Postgame Quotes
1/29/2015 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
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Head Coach Tom Crean |
Opening Statement...
Bottom line is: we were not good enough in the paint. Our best defender was 6'3". It wasn't just what the five men did, we just didn't guard the paint well enough tonight and our aggressiveness on offense didn't turn into what it should have been which is a lot simpler basketball.
It wasn't as much of a turnover as it was the drives. It defies description, some of the drives we made on AJ. It's funny that Yogi never gets a shot blocked because he understands to keep driving the ball underneath the basket and find the open man and we work on the same thing constantly and we've got to keep learning.
We've got to keep teaching these guys how to simplify the game because against a team that's aggressive like Purdue, against a team that is playing with the edge and passion that they had tonight - we just have to simplify it. We didn't trust the corners enough, and didn't take the open jump shot with air, we tried to drive too much and tried to drive into traffic rather than just making a simple pass, knock down the shot, and let's see what happens again on the glass because we did offensive rebound the ball and we did get some good looks and I thought we could've gotten a lot more. But because of that, they were able to get out in transition, our transition defense wasn't nearly as good as it needs to be against anybody but especially against a team on the road, and the way they ran tonight was really good.
But bottom line is we knew we were going to have to play really well at the free throw line. And even though we won the rebounding game, we didn't win the free throw game. And because we never got to the line to set our defense enough, and get those easy baskets, it hurt us.
But they played a good game, and played with a lot of edge, a lot of passion. We had some guys like Yogi who played extremely well, I'm proud of the way Rob came back and played tonight because we weren't sure if he was going to be able to do that. But again, they played well but we put ourselves in positions to allow them to do that too many times by not making simple plays.
Why did you play Stan over James to start the second half? What was the reasoning there?
Did you see the first half defensively? Who did you think was doing the best job on AJ Hammons? I thought it was Stan, so that's what we did.
How much of a factor were guys like Smotherman and Bryson Scott and guys who aren't normally huge contributors?
Yeah, they've got a good team. When they're clicking like that, they're a good team.
I know earlier in the season for a couple of games there were some players that struggled as a team, what can you do to make sure that's not falling, that you can still get some sort of productive shot?
Bottom line is, it's as simple as it sounds, we didn't make the pass one dribble sooner. One reason why we've been shooting at such a high percentage is because we just simplify it and we didn't do a good enough job of playing to the guys that needed to touch the ball more like Colin Hartman? And Colin wasn't nearly as aggressive as he needed to be, and we never took advantage of what we felt were our match-up advantages.
But really, when we're just making simple passes, against pressure defense and all that, that's good. But if you just make the simple pass you're going to give yourself a chance for us to knock down the shot. Some of our three's and our jumpers were a challenge, where if we just make a simple pass, get one more reversal, kick it one dribble earlier rather than one dribble late and keep driving the ball when we get into the paint, instead of trying to make a play on the shot blocker like we're in some backyard pick-up game, just keep driving the ball and make the next pass. That's how we play. We don't have a post-game to just throw it down in there and play out of that post, so we've got to play off the drive and kick and make it as simple as possible.