“First, let me say I want to apologize for what happened at the end of the game, man. That should never happen. As the head coach, I take full responsibility for that. My guys gotta do better, I gotta do better, it will never happen again. I didn’t think any players deserved to be up here today. No one did anything to come up here and get an interview, so I told everybody they didn’t have to come, I’d do it. To answer your question, we got beat pretty bad in all phases…on the court, coaching, everything. It’s disappointing because I thought we had a good couple days of preparation. You can’t let a team come out like that and get 40 points in the first half, especially coming off a loss. I knew they were gonna come out and get fired up, but I thought we had a good couple days and it’s disappointing because I didn’t expect this. But I’ll take the blame for it, it’s on me. We gotta do better, I gotta do better.”
On any supposed incidents in the postgame handshake line:
“Nothing happened. We’re good.”
On whether or not Seton Hall gave up:
“I don’t want to say yes, because I’ve never had a team give up. I don’t want to say yes, I just want to say that we got outplayed.”
On his message at halftime:
“We had a talk and told the guys, ‘you gotta man up, you gotta come out and defend.’ It was a great crowd, a very important game, and coming out flat because we had trouble scoring kind of hurt us on defense. And then letting these guys hit five or six threes in the first half, something they do really well, was unacceptable. So we had a talk. I thought the guys came out the first five minutes of the second half and got right back into it, and started turning the basketball over.”
On Kadary Richmond’s status:
“It’s day-to-day. We gotta try to figure out soreness in the back, spasms and stuff like that. We gotta see how he feels the next couple days.”
On when it was determined he was unavailable:
“Earlier today.”
On Jaquan Sanders:
“He showed something. He went in there and made some shots for us, which we desperately need. I just gotta get him to defend now, right? When you score 11 points, you can’t give up 11 points. But it was good that he was ready. I’ve been talking to him about being ready, he came in and I thought he made some shots for us, he made some plays. That’s good for me to see, because we need somebody to make some shots moving forward.”
On playing his freshmen more:
“The season ain’t over, man. You only do that when the season is over. I’m not saying that I’m not gonna play my freshmen, I’m gonna play who I think can help us. If it’s a freshman, it’s a freshman. I think there’s a lot of basketball to be played. We’ve got two more games and then you’ve got the Big East tournament. I’m not really feeling that question, that question wasn’t a good one.”
On expectations moving forward:
“We gotta bounce back. We’ve gotta watch film, learn from it and have a quick turnaround. We’ve got a good Villanova team coming in, who’s playing really well, the kid (Justin) Moore's getting back to the Moore who I thought — if he didn’t get hurt — probably would have been preseason player of the year. I thought the last game, he played like it. They’re a veteran team, we gotta come back Tuesday and make sure we win for the seniors.”
On what might be missing in this recent stretch:
“You tell me. I think we’ve been battling, we’re just coming up short. I don’t want to say we’re not battling, we’ve just gotta stop letting teams get these runs on us. We’re fighting hard to battle back and I think we kind of run out of gas.”
On his message to the fans:
“I thought (the crowd) was great. I thought it was unbelievable. It was good to see the student section packed. I’m sorry that we couldn’t pull it out tonight, but I hope they come back Tuesday and send the seniors off well. They deserve it, and like I said, this game is on me. I’m gonna go back to the lab and try to kind of tweak a couple things and see how we could get a big one Tuesday night, so that’s pretty much it.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.