“I thought we just came out and weren’t paying attention to detail. I told these guys the last two days of practice, if we come out and let these guys shoot, it’s gonna be a long day, because they could shoot the basketball. I think they had six or seven threes in the first half. I think we kind of shut it down in the second half, but give these guys credit. NJIT came out and they played their hearts out, and I told my guys this was going to be their Super Bowl. I thought Grant did a tremendous job getting these guys ready, they ran good stuff. I’m super proud of him, his team competed.”
On Dre Davis playing more as a small-ball five:
“Heck no, I don’t want to see that. You know what? Let’s give NJIT a lot of credit. I said it before, I thought Grant and his team came out and played a heck of a game, a good home showing for them, they gave their fans something to be excited about. For us, this is a work in progress. I don’t want to come out here and make excuses, but I’m dealing with this because I don’t know who’s going to be in practice, I don’t know the lineups, this is our first time playing this lineup. When I come to practice, whoever’s there is there. Like I said, I don’t want to make excuses, but no, I don’t want to play a small-ball lineup like that. Not in our league. No way. Not the Big East, it’s the best league in the country. But sometimes you gotta adjust to what you got, right? These guys adjusted and I thought we came out — I didn’t want to run too much — if you look at the offense, we didn’t run too much, I didn’t want to show too much. But like I said, give those guys a lot of credit, they played hard.”
On ball movement:
“The goal was to come in and play the four guys — which were Kadary, Al, Dre and Dylan — 20 minutes. That was the goal. Those four guys are the guys that have been practicing the whole time, so I ask a lot of those guys as far as load management. I didn’t want to play them that much today, I just wanted the young guys to get some experience but at the end of the day, you’re a competitor, so you want to go out and try to win the game. I don’t know, man. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
On foul trouble for Jaden Bediako and Elijah Hutchins-Everett:
“They gotta adjust to the referees. I teach a certain way in practice, we get after each other, we do a lot of banging, we do a lot of stuff like that. They just gotta know when to turn it off and on. And I think today was good, playing in front of the referees, getting each other to say, ‘that’s a foul, that’s not a foul.’ And now, we can get back and we can learn from it.”
On Isaiah Coleman:
“Yeah, Zay is good. He’s gotta get used to playing college basketball. He’s a very good high school basketball player, very athletic. I think once he gets it and understands it, he’s gonna be good for us. He’s a rotation guy, for sure.”
On what he needs to see from Seton Hall’s reserves:
“We just have to get Jaquan Sanders back healthy. He was playing really well before he had a high ankle sprain. He was out for three weeks, and today, I think he’s about 70 percent. He’s a tough kid, he tried to practice and play through it. I probably should be a little smarter and let him get healed, because we’re gonna need him, he can shoot the basketball even though he didn’t show it tonight. We just have to get our guys some reps. We gotta get Sada some reps, Elijah’s going be fine once he calms down. From there, we’ve just gotta go back to the drawing board, to be honest with you, because I don’t want to play these guys these types of minutes.”
On Al-Amir Dawes as a secondary ball handler:
“The goal is to play three playmakers, right? And I’ve got Kadary, Dylan And Al out there. Al ran a lot of point this summer for us to get ready for this moment, so I was proud of him. His shot wasn’t falling tonight, I thought he could have attacked a little bit more, but I thought he did a good job of getting in the lane late and finding people, and made some shots down the stretch. But like I said, man, this definitely was a learning tool for us. It was good for us to get out and play in front of people. I don’t think we played extremely well at all, but you could always take something out of it. A good friend of mine always tells me, there’s always a positive to a negative. And the positive I found was I never want to play small ball like that, but if we have to, it’s good to know that we could do it.”
On playing NJIT in a similar exhibition next year:
“It’s good. I want to thank everybody for coming out, all you guys for coming out. It’s for a great cause. Jerry Walker does a tremendous job in Jersey City with his foundation and with those young guys and young women. I just want to thank everybody for coming out, I thought it was a good crowd. Like I said, I’m extremely happy for Grant. People got a chance to see he’s a good coach.”
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