Kevin Willard quote book: St. John’s

By Jake Copestick (@JakeCopestick)

On St. John’s coming out with more intensity:

“I mean, no matter what, this was going to be a tough game. I worked for (Rick Pitino) for 10 years, so I kind of imagined what practice was like for the last two days with them. I think the biggest difference is that they’re a veteran team. (Pitino) knew that Zuby (Ejiofor) wasn’t going to come out and lay an egg, and he didn’t. He was phenomenal defensively, the way he was switching and communicating. Give them a lot of credit, they played well.”

On what he can tell his team after a loss like this:

“We’re going to move on. We have two more games left. Life happens. You get your ass kicked every once in a while.”

On St. John’s defensive intensity and physicality outside of Zuby Ejiofor:

“When Dillon Mitchell’s playing that way, their whole season changed once he started. He’s in the starting lineup, the guy doesn’t shoot, he doesn’t take shots. He’s just such a positive factor on every end. He knows how to move without the ball, he doesn’t look for the ball. I think the biggest difference is you’ve got Bryce Hopkins, who played power forward last year, now playing small forward. That front line is really good.”

On an update on Matt Hodge’s injury:

“No.”

On concern about scoring droughts on offense: 

“No, I mean, we still won seven out of our last nine games. We lost to UConn and St. John’s. Unfortunately, I caught UConn after they played their worst game of the year. It seems like God is punishing me for my sins.”

On Ian Jackson’s performance:

“You obviously didn’t watch the first time he played against us. He played much better the first time he played against us. He must be a big fan of mine. He’s good man, defensively, he gets after it. I thought that (Dylan) Darling is one of those guys who’s just a pest, and everyone looks at him like he’s not that good of a player, but man, he does so many good things. More than anything, I thought Darling set the tone defensively. He picked us up full-court, and then Jackson came in and just picked up that pressure. I think when they’re playing like that, and they made shots early, we knew they were going to come out. He started talking about they were shooting too many twos, and we gave them a couple threes. Zuby hit that big three late for that first run, that was kind of a killer. He’s a good player.”

On what Rick Pitino practices were like after a big loss:

“I’m not bullshitting you, I don’t have hair because of him. I had a full set of hair when I started working for him. Like, it’s the most miserable experience in life, like you fear for your life everyday. Everyone laughs when I say that, but you think you’re going to get fired. It’s miserable. As he’s gotten older, he’s probably become more of a cranky old bitch than he was. Like, you literally fear for your life when you walk in. Like, when he walks in the facility, he’s walking in at 6:30 and you’ve been there since 5:30 thinking you have everything right. He comes in and asks you the one question that you don’t know. He’s that intense. He always has been. He’s got the most energy of any coach that I’ve been around. I think he has the perfect player in Zuby. Zuby and him really match so well together. I think that’s why they’ve been so successful.”

On the 18 points off turnovers by St. John’s in the first half:

“What’s really good is that Zuby is so good at reading what you’re trying to do. So you try to set pick-and-rolls with your five man, he’s going to switch, you’re switching with Mitchell a lot too. So you’re really not rolling and taking advantage of that. And then you have their guards who know they can be aggressive because they have Zuby back there. It makes a huge difference. Then you have Mitchell, who can really disrupt. It’s a really disruptive team. We struggled with them the first time, and obviously we struggled again with them this time.”

On his message to the team at halftime:

“I wanted to come out and play better in the second half, I thought we did that for most of it. We got it back down to 17 for a little bit. Losing Matt was difficult, because emotionally, Matt is such a great kid. Malachi is out there for 30 minutes, which he isn’t used to. I love the way we came out for the first 16 minutes in the second half. The last four minutes were a little disappointing.”