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INDIANA UNIVERSITY BASKETBALL MEDIA CONFERENCEJanuary 19, 2016Max BielfeldtYogi FerrellTroy WilliamsBloomington, Indiana Illinois - 69, Indiana - 103 Yogi, can you just talk about breaking the record? YOGI FERRELL: That's a great honor. I played with a lot of great guys coming up: Victor Oladipo, Cody Zeller, Jordan Hulls, Christian Watford, that's what I like to be. I like to be a facilitator for my team, and I feel like I've gotten to have known my teammates very well all four years, the guys that are coming in here, in and out. So I basically know where they're going to be on the court. I know where they like to hit threes. That's what I've got to do is basically get the ball to them and they make the magic happen. Q. Before setting the record, did you have a visual of what it would look like? YOGI FERRELL: Oh, is that what it was? I got $20 for you (laughing). No, I don't. I mean, I wasn't really trying to force the issue. I knew I was one assist away, but I was just going to go out there and play the same game that I normally play, push the ball, push the tempo. I know my teammates are going to run with me. I know they're going to run with me, and I'm going to get them the ball. Q. Are you really going to give him $20? YOGI FERRELL: No, I'm just joking, I'm not going to give him $20. I'm a broke college kid, man (laughing). Q. Troy can you talk about the threes tonight? TROY WILLIAMS: Not really. It's not like we come out and that's our game plan is to shoot threes. We just drive the ball inside, get it rotated outside and knock down to three. Or we get in transition, like one example, I get in transition and I pass it back to Yogi for the three. Just shooting the right shot at the right time. Q. Troy, how much easier is your job scoring with Yogi on the court? TROY WILLIAMS: He's going to give us the ball in the right spot where we can make plays. Like he trusts us with the ball, and we trust to give him the ball and he makes the right plays. Q. Max, you guys seem different than the first month. What changed? MAX BIELFELDT: I think we had just our mindset. We're really focusing in. We're a lot clearer on what we want to do. There was a little uncertainty at times in the past, and I think we just really worked on that in practice and just kind of harped on the small things and playing that defense as a unit. Everyone being there for each other if there was emergency help or whatever it is. I think we really kind of worked on that to a point where it's not getting talked about as much where we have that defensive liability. I think we just worked on it enough where we're starting to be the defensive team we want to be. YOGI FERRELL: Yeah, to go off that, it's basically a mindset, like Max said. We didn't really know what we were doing to start off with, but I felt like we got better concepts and we worked on those concepts every day in practice. We're just going to carry that to the game. With that, we've got to have the mindset, okay, we want to get a stop and we want to hold them under a certain field goal percentage. If we do that and get multiple stops in a row, that's what gets us going and gets our offense going. Q. Yogi, talk about the moment with coach Crean? YOGI FERRELL: Yeah, I didn't know he was going to do that. I thought he was just trying to give me a handshake. But that's pretty cool, man, all the fans cheering for me. It just shows how special Hoosier Nation is and all the fans that are behind us. Q. A lot of folks talked about dealing with losing James. Is it fair to say at some level when you lose a player like that, it just has to sharpen everybody's focus a little bit? MAX BIELFELDT: I would definitely say that especially last year with all get guys that went down when I was a senior in Michigan, we saw that firsthand. And losing James was that same sort of effect. One of our key guys goes down, and it's that next-man up mentality of a freshman. You have to go in there and start playing like a veteran. So far we've seen some big things out of our young guys, and everyone that's stepped up, has stepped up really well. Q. Max, if you don't know his brother-in-law is Meyers Leonard who played in Illinois and is now with the Portland Trailblazers. MAX BIELFELDT: I haven't checked it yet. Q. You're now linked to the record breaking assist. MAX BIELFELDT: Hey, that's awesome. To be a part of that, that's a heck of a record. It just shows how talented he is and the guys he's played with. I've been on the other end of that before trying to stop him. It's a lot more fun to receive those passes than trying to defend them. Q. Yogi, do you know Michael Lewis? YOGI FERRELL: I don't. Was he the previous record holder? No, I don't. I'm not up to date with the record holders. Q. Can you talk about how you balance facilitating and scoring? YOGI FERRELL: I think I've learned it hasn't been too difficult playing here. I basically like to take what the defense gives me. They've got to take something away, and each game is going to be something different. It just depends on what the game has given me, and what the game has given our team. First my strategy is just push the ball. If I can drive to the rim and score a quick bucket, I'll do that. But I just want to push it and try to find my teammates. Q. Yogi, obviously you've been here four years, where would you rank this in terms of the chemistry so far? YOGI FERRELL: This chemistry is great. I'd probably rank it with my freshman year. It's just us being one mind. Collectively, we know what we want to do. And when we know what we want to do, we're unstoppable. Q. Yogi and Max, you both said you kind of didn't know what you were doing early on. How has that changed or how has it become clearer? MAX BIELFELDT: I'd say you've got to think about you have a lot of new guys coming in. You have Thomas guarding college ball screens for the first time and all these new pieces. You practice them for October, September, all those months. And you finally get to the game, and you've got teams throwing all sorts of different things at you. It's regarding some different athletes, different players, and I think it just took us a little bit to kind of figure out what we needed to do and what was most effective. So it was partially that, and partially what we were talking about earlier with the mindset. So I think definitely just repetitions and all the guys and everyone just kind of playing as one unit. Q. Yogi, now what do you tell some of these younger players on your team about what to expect each night? YOGI FERRELL: Yeah, I mean, we've got a bullseye on our back being the No. 1 team in the Big Ten now. So we've got to take it day by day. We definitely can't let up now especially. Every day's going to be a process for us. Even though we've set a standard for where we want to be and where we've met, we want to push that standard up for us and we just want to be great. Q. You obviously didn't look at the record books, is there a reason for that? YOGI FERRELL: No, not really. That's why I don't like looking at all that stuff. I like to focus in on the games. I like to focus in on my film, my extra work, because at the end of the day people aren't going to really remember this record. They're going to remember whether you won games or not. Q. Talk about Max and Robert's getting going early tonight? YOGI FERRELL: Yeah, I mean, that just picks our energy up and takes away the energy from the other team. We're just moving the ball around, sharing it. Those guys go in spurts like that, and it just shows what we can do as a team and our capability. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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