Kevin Willard quote book: Maryland

On his pride in Seton Hall’s effort:
“Yeah, I think that’s...I didn’t know if we could win because I knew we were going to struggle scoring at times, but I knew on Monday after practice that this team is still going to be as good as I thought they were going to be. We watched film for two-and-a-half hours and we practiced for an hour and a half, and after the practice, I was looking to see how they were going to bounce back. They were honest in the film, we all talked about things that were going on in the film, and then we had three days of our best practice we’ve had all year. They proved to me that they weren’t going to hang their heads, they weren’t going to worry about anything, and they showed up and they played great defensively.”

On Quincy McKnight:
“I think Quincy’s answered the bell since he stepped on campus, so I’m not worried about Q. I knew Q was smart enough to be able to handle sliding over a position and learning a new position in a couple of days. He’s got a great basketball IQ.”

On Romaro Gill and Ike Obiagu blocking 12 shots:
“I think it was great because we were able to be much more aggressive full-court. Obviously, not having Myles changes what you can do offensively, but we were able to be a little bit more aggressive defensively, even more than we have in the past, because now you beat them and you’ve got those two guys down, and I thought Ro was fantastic in the first half and I thought Ike was great in the second half.”

On Seton Hall’s postgame FaceTime with Myles Powell:
“I told him to turn off the lights. He’s jumping all around, he’s not supposed to be jumping around. He did most of the talking, he just said how proud he was and how much he missed us, and then I yelled at him because he’s supposed to be in a dark room not doing anything, and he’s not doing it.”

On handling Maryland’s press:
“We didn’t handle it great, but we handled it a little bit better. It’s just something we’ve got to continue to work on. Obviously we didn’t handle the Oregon game overly well, but I thought guys had a better understanding of what to do. We’ve just got to get a little better at it.”

On Anthony Nelson:
“I thought Anthony exactly what I’ve been envisioning what Ant would be, someone that I can give the ball to and he can make plays. Off misses, I thought he was great with the tempo, and I thought Ant was really good with the fact that we wanted to use a lot of clock, like, I wasn’t going to be worried if we had three or four shot clock violations. We couldn’t get in a ping-pong match with them, they’re too good. He understood that we were going to start offense with 18 seconds on the shot clock and we were going to get a lot of shots with two or three seconds, and I thought he managed that tremendously.”

On playing at home for the first time in nearly a month:
“The biggest thing I’ve been telling these guys over the last week is I’m not emotional anymore, I deal with reality. We played at Iowa State in front of 15,000 people and lost our second-best player three minutes into the game, and then we went and played our rival game without our second-best player and lost an All-American technically three minutes into the game and played four-on-five for about 12 of those minutes. I said the reality of the situation is we’ve had a brutal schedule, we haven’t had time, we haven’t had a whole lot of home games — we’ve played the least home games of anybody else — and I said where we are and who we are, we’re still that team at the beginning of the season. I said we’ve just played a lot harder schedule than everybody else. It was great being at home because we played great defense at Iowa State — I think they had two points in the first seven minutes, eight minutes of the game, but we had five — and when you’re on the road, eventually if you’re not scoring and you’re playing great defense, eventually a guy like (Tyrese) Haliburton or Geo Baker’s going to make shots and they’re going to break your back, and that’s kind of what happened. I thought the crowd kind of helped us overcome some of our offensive struggles.”

On the win being a confidence booster:
“I think it’s important, more importantly, I never look at things that way. I think the way they bounced back from Saturday and the way they attacked this week with a businesslike attitude, with a humble attitude to get ready for this game, that will go farther than any win will.”

On neutralizing Maryland:
“I think Maryland has a chance to win a national championship. I think they’re that good. When you have (Anthony) Cowan...they’ve had nine days off since they lost to Penn State, that’s sometimes not a good thing, and then going on the road — they’ve been back-to-back road games — I think (if) you get them on a neutral floor with that talent, the way they shoot it, I think (Aaron) Wiggins is one of the best shooters I’ve seen, I think they’re that good. I thought switching up defenses and being a little bit aggressive kept them off balance. I thought that was key.”

On weak-side perimeter pressure:
“I thought Q and Ant were really pivotal in just keeping them off balance. We put three or four guys on Cowan, who I think is tremendous, and I thought when you can switch guys and you don’t get the same guy all the time and they’re switching defenses, you can kind of get a guy like Cowan a little bit off balance.”

On Myles Powell:
“Myles is doing great. We use the term out indefinitely because I didn’t want to put a timeline on it, because it’s going to be a while. He won’t be back Sunday, he’s probably not going to be back for DePaul, we’re going to take our time with this. He kind of got a triple KO in the game: He took the charge, he got a shoulder and then he got a late shoulder again, the combination of the three has made it a pretty serious concussion. The good thing is the Big East has done a lot with concussion protocol and our trainer has led the way, so we’ve done genetic testing for him, we have every test so far in a baseline, so he’s doing great. He’s in great spirits, I talked to him before the game, we talked afterwards. He’s ecstatic, but he will not be back anytime soon.”

On the extended film session:
“Two-and-a-half hours is very out of the ordinary, yes. But again, my main goal is getting Jared and Tyrese comfortable in a spot that they really haven’t played, and I had to get Quincy comfortable doing some things that he has not done in two years. It was something that was necessary not just for today’s game, it was more necessary for moving forward.”

On importance of this game for Seton Hall’s supporting cast:
“Very important, just because they really haven’t struggled. It’s just that when you have one guy take 50 percent of your shots, they don’t have the chance to shine as much as people think they should be doing at certain times. But I think it’s very important for the fact they understand who they are right now, and right now, we’ve got to be a bunch of junkyard dogs and we’ve got to be nitty and we’ve got to be gritty, and we’ve got to scratch and claw our way to victories. We’re just not going to be able to kind of rely on one guy to get 26 points and a power forward to get 14 and eight. We’re just going to have to be much different.”

On gaining experience from adjusting to life without Powell and Sandro Mamukelashvili:
“I’ve said this since Sandro went down: I’ve said it’s only going to help us come February. The amount of time that Jared’s getting — Jared didn’t play last year at the beginning of the year, Ant played sparingly, he came in and got spot minutes — so these guys are now getting big-time minutes in big-time games. It’s only going to help them and help us. It’s going to give them confidence, and they know when they’re on the floor, they can do it.”