By Jason Guerette (@JPGuerette)
“I’m not sure we should have got ourselves in that hole, but I thought that group that finished the game off — minus Steph, it was the same group I had in there at Marquette towards the end — they just kept playing. They just kept playing, and the game plan was to try to get back in transition and take away the three. In the second half, I thought we did that, and I thought that’s what got us back. We couldn’t put our pressure on because we couldn’t score, then once we started scoring, we started putting pressure on them.”
On the game-winning sequence with Budd Clark and Najai Hines:
“I didn’t think (Creighton) was going to come out in a 1-3-1, I never saw them really do that. But the play was for (Clark) to make a play, and Josh and Najai to be in position, if he missed, to get a putback. And I thought Najai did a good job of getting in position and catching it, keeping it high, not dropping it and finishing.”
On closing out games:
“Last year is last year, man. I don’t know why we’re still talking about that. That’s over, big dawg. The difference is when you’ve got better guard play. That’s just the bottom line, no disrespect to the team last year, I love all those guys, but when you’ve got better guard play, you get yourself in position to be in games. And this year, we’ve just got better guard play, and I think that’s why we find ourselves to be in games. And no disrespect to our bigs, I mean, for Najai to play like this as a freshman in his second game back from being out, it just shows you that when you have a balanced team, like I keep saying, any given night, it’s somebody different. It’s not gonna be the same person. We don’t have a ‘stud’ or somebody that’s gonna give us 20. We’ve got a bunch of guys that are 10, 11, 12, around that area, and each night, somebody steps up.”
On aggressiveness and drawing fouls:
“I thought we were aggressive in the first half. We just missed a lot of chippies. If you watched the first half, we were getting the ball at the basket, we just weren’t finishing. It’s good for us to go to the free throw line. I thought we did a good job cashing in on that, but the whole thing is that group that played just played with energy. Like, we had no life at all, the first group didn’t give us anything. We made some adjustments and once we started getting into it, the crowd got into it and I thought it was good. The kids fed off that. This is a good win for us. Creighton’s a really, really good team, obviously Greg is a really good coach and the way they’ve been playing in conference play, this is a big win for us.”
On his message during Seton Hall’s comeback:
“We were right there. We could have got it down to two, got it down to three, got it down to one, but we were just missing some stuff. I knew if we kept being aggressive and kept driving, and just didn’t let them make threes, I think that was the difference. They didn’t make threes in the second half, and because we didn’t force it in the first half, they got some runouts. In the second half, they didn’t get a lot of runouts. I thought that was the difference.”
On Trey Parker:
“With Trey, it’s always easy to play him with another guard. When he’s out there by himself, there’s a lot of pressure on him to try and make plays. When he’s out there with Budd, now you’ve got two of them and that’s easy for him to kind of go away a little bit and just kind of play off Budd, and do what he do, drive the ball to the basket. I’ve been trying to tell him I want him to be more aggressive. He’s one of our most athletic guys on the team by far, but he’s not really showing it. I want him to start showing it.”
On slow starts in the second half:
“The way you prepare is the way you play. We haven’t been preparing well. Guys now, everybody’s sore, everybody’s hurt, you can’t do this, you can’t do that, you can’t practice. And when you can’t practice, you can’t prepare the way you’re supposed to play. When you prepare, this is what happens against good teams in our league.”
On balanced offense being a catalyst:
“I just think it takes guys defending and then us feeding off our defense for offense, and I thought that’s what happened in the second half. We fed off our defense. Guys didn’t care about who took the shot, we were just playing defense and playing with energy, getting stops and getting runouts. And when you play like that, good things happen. That’s what I keep trying to tell these guys: Stop taking me shots. Just take a Seton Hall shot. And I thought Budd took a Seton Hall shot, and because he took that shot, our two guys were in position to rebound, and that’s the difference.”
On alumni support and delivering a win like this:
“It means everything. When you’re a former player like I am here, and I tell these guys all the time, I ain’t just the coach. This is all of our program. This is everybody who played, everybody who wore this uniform from when they first played all the way until now. These guys, they invested a lot of time, blood, sweat and tears, so for those guys to come back
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