“To be honest, Jerry, I’m disappointed. I’m happy with the win, it’s always good to win, but when these guys decided to — said they wanted to play, I was a little hesitant because when you have a big letdown like they had the other night not getting in — we all thought we were, we thought we did enough to. As a parent, it’s like I’ve got 16 little brothers and 16 kids there, and they’re all looking to me for an answer, and I don’t know what to say. And then in the last two days of practice, I’ve seen this and I was trying to warn them how good St. Joe’s is. I saw that draw and I was like, oh, goodness. We’re playing a really good team that could shoot the basketball, and we’ve gotta — the next two days, we gotta do something. We’ve gotta get our thing back, whatever that thing is, because you can’t play like this and expect to win. Teams are too good. But I thought we did enough to win, I thought the small lineup helped us tremendously, it played like a shot in our arm. I thought Zay came in and played tremendously, and I thought that was the difference in the game when we went small.”
On his message when Seton Hall trailed 48-40:
“It’s a different type of talk now than during the year. Now I’m like, ‘fellas, come on. This is something that you wanted to do, something that we said we were gonna do as a team, so now you guys gotta pick it up.’ I had to make an adjustment with the pick-and-roll defense, it was hurting us and it hadn’t hurt us in a long time. And then these out of bounds plays, I don’t know what was going on. We never let teams score that many points, ever, underneath out of bounds. So those things, I got a couple days to clean up, give these guys a couple days now. The first one’s always the hard one, especially after a mental and physical letdown like not getting in the tournament. Now hopefully, they’ll get back to being Seton Hall.”
On a tournament mindset:
“The first one’s the hard one. You’ve gotta get through the first one and they’ve gotta feel good about themselves. Like the last couple days, they’ve been feeling sorry for themselves. I’ve been trying everything to pick them up, but now, hopefully this will make them feel a little better about themselves and then we’ll get a couple days to prepare for a good team.”
On Seton Hall’s smaller lineup:
“It was good. It was us, it was Seton Hall. We played with energy, we played with passion. I thought Dylan played great, he got some deflections, he got some steals and he got us back going. We kind of finished it off.”
On turning the page for the NIT:
“For me, I’m super different than anybody else. My switch was once we found out who we were playing, that was my switch. I was here until almost 2:00 in the morning watching all of St. Joe’s games before I left to go home. My switch, I’ve been switched. But it’s hard for young adults, right? It’s like, what do I say to you after you did everything I asked of you to get where we wanted to go, and it didn’t happen? Like, how can I get us over that hump? And I thought basketball would get you over the hump. Now you’re back to your element of what you know and what you do well, being on the court. And for two days in practice, I’m sitting there like — I don’t have no hair, but I’m like, goodness, what am I supposed to do to get these guys going? I’m trying everything, and hopefully this win will kind of help these guys to start feeling good about themselves again.”
On North Texas:
“I didn’t watch them play yet. Tonight, I will. I’ll have the answer tomorrow or maybe Friday. I’ll be up tonight watching them play. I haven’t watched them play, so I don’t want to give you a BS answer. I don’t do that. I don’t know their personnel, I don’t know who left last year, who was there. I don’t know anything about them, but I know basketball, right? And basketball, scouting’s important, but coming to play is even more important. So obviously, I’ll get a feel for them the next couple days and then see what happens.”
On managing the NIT and the offseason:
“Well, the future is now in my mind, right? The future is now. You’ve gotta be able to do both. It is what it is, right? These guys want to play, me and my coaches have to do our job as far as the portal stuff, but the future is now. The future is trying to make this team and trying to win the NIT. That’s the future, and then we’ll go from there.”
On the Walsh Gymnasium atmosphere:
“It’s Walsh. It’s great playing here, I thought the fans were tremendous, it was loud, I thought our guys started to feed off it late. When Al made that big three and took the lead, it was a different type of level from there. It was great.”
On Seton Hall’s execution:
“We didn’t do anything good. I’ll be honest with you, the only thing in the second half that we did good was I think in the first half, they had six threes and I think they finished with 10. I thought we did a good job on the kid (Cameron) Brown, who’s really good, (Erik) Reynolds is really good. Both Browns are good, but they’re a different type of team, man. They’re really good, they could go small, they could go big, the big kid is really skilled. He made some terrific passes, hit two threes, and then when the kid (Rasheer) Fleming was playing, he got on the offensive glass. They’re a good team, and their point guard didn’t play, the kid (Lynn) Greer, he didn’t play. But good team, it’s hard to prepare for a team like that in a short period of time, especially when your mind’s not into it with our guys. You could tell by the underneath out of bounds plays. If you watch my team, that never happens to us, ever. But it happened.”
On representing the Big East:
“You know what, Adam? It’s really tough, man. As the game was going on, I’m sitting there thinking to myself, did I make a mistake in not, being the captain of the ship, telling them no? Because I know how emotional they were, and I knew it was going to be really tough for them to get up. But then after a while, you say sometimes you gotta let it be what it is, right? Three teams lost, I haven’t watched any basketball since we lost — live basketball, I’ve been watching St. Joe’s — but tomorrow the Peacocks play, right? I’m so happy about that, so excited to watch those guys play. I’m happy for Donald (Copeland), he had a big, big win (with Wagner), and we gotta get up and get ready for North Texas.”
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