UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA BASKETBALL MEDIA CONFERENCE

January 25, 2022

Tom Crean

Men's Basketball Press Conference

Georgia - 82, Alabama - 76

COACH CREAN: I'm really proud of these guys and for a lot of reasons. And the staff because we got better between South Carolina and tonight because of the way we prepared and practiced.

When I told them you don't get an edge in the game, right, the momentum is up for grabs in the game and things of that nature, but you don't gain an edge in the game. You gain an edge from preparation and practice.

We came back in, we were in here Sunday night after I got back from Milwaukee, from the Marquette experience, with the hall of fame, and we practiced for about an hour and a half.

We came back yesterday. It was phenomenal. We had a solid walk through. Nobody is hanging their heads. There's tremendous energy. They're buying into the fact that we believe we're going to win. And tonight we didn't see those ghosts that we sometimes see, when things start to go bad for us.

And I'm really, really proud of the way they played. But, again, the preparation leading into it, the spirit, the togetherness, those are things that carried us through, and it carried us through the game.

Got a lot of good basketball from a lot of people. But our fans, they were outstanding. And our student section that was there, they were fantastic. And the energy in the building, when we needed them the most, was at the highest level. I'm very, very thankful for that. So we'll go from there.

Q. Is it relief? What's the primary emotion you feel since it's been so long?

COACH CREAN: I think there's a lot. I think there's a lot. I shared them all with my daughters, which is important. So I would guess there's some relief. But there's also, like I told the guys before the game, as corny as it sounds, you've got to play with joy. You really do. We're playing college basketball in the SEC, at a great school. Right? And against a top team. Play with some real joy and enthusiasm. So I think there's that.

The guys were happy. They were happy, but they weren't overly giddy, but they were excited. They earned it. They know it. That's what we've said. We've just got to get this thing started. We've just got to get it started. And that happened for us tonight.

So there's some relief. For me it's happiness for them and for the staff and really for our families. But here in about 30 minutes I'll be on to Vanderbilt.

Q. I saw you got on the phone quickly in the stands over there. I'm not sure who you were talking to but I was going to ask you who that was. Was it Joani or somebody?

COACH CREAN: Yeah, that was my wife. I wanted to share it with her real quick.

Q. Some of the players were talking about, and you kind of alluded to it, I think Aaron Cook said the job's not done. And someone else said you mentioned about, hey, let's continue winning. How much, now that you think that you guys played a complete game that they have that confidence?

COACH CREAN: Well, that's what we needed. We'll see from there. That's exactly what you need, that they could finish it. And we did finish it. And there were a couple moments, the jump-ball calls and things like that that we had to work through. But nobody got their head down. Nobody got their head down.

We knew we were playing against a really good team, a really well-coached team. But as I said to them today -- and let's remember, there's two-thirds of the conference season left. It's real easy to forget that.

And I don't know what they hear or listen to on the outside. I know I don't listen to much at all, but I know I have to be cognizant of what they listen to. But at the end of the day the only thing we can fix overcome it are the ones inside the gym with us. I thought everybody did that. I really thought.

I thought Ty McMillan came off his best practice yesterday in probably three weeks. And he came in and played solid for us. That's the kind of momentum we have to have.

Jabri Abdur-Rahim made all his free throws but one. There's so many things that go into the game.

Dalen played the most minutes that he's played. Aaron played a complete game. Kario was back. When he got in the Vanderbilt game he was averaging almost 24 points a game, 23.6. He gets hurt on the dunk. He's never the same in that game. Doesn't play against Auburn. And he's not really the same against South Carolina.

It's hard to take good players out of your lineup. It's really hard to take the leading scorer out of your lineup. Even when he was back the other day, he really wasn't as good. Tonight he had more of that energy, that pop and he played well.

So we just have to keep understanding that you just persevere through the tough times. You just persevere through it. And you don't lose your enthusiasm or your joy for it. I'm never going to let that happen to me.

So, like I said to those guys today, if you're struggling believing we can win, go sit up in the seats. Maybe your parents have an extra seat, because it ain't going to be on the bench. We need to believe we're going to win the games throughout the game even when it's a game of runs.

Jack (indiscernible) said something to me today that made a lot of sense. He's been fantastic and he sent me some great texts. He said of all the sports, basketball is the one where things are going to go bad in the game. They're not going to go your way inside of that game. And you've got to be able to overcome it.

And it's a great perspective. Things will go wrong. It's a game of runs. And our guys never dropped their heads when they went on a run, and we got our run back.

Q. Your guys did an awesome job at the foul line tonight. Their second 20-plus free throw half in the last two games. That's pretty incredible. That allowed you to come back despite only making two field goals in the last six minutes. How much is it living at the line beginning to factor in the team's offensive identity and rescue the success?

COACH CREAN: It has to. And it was hard for us to get to the basket early on with the dropped coverages they were in. But we opened it up as we went along and scored points off turnovers today, where we haven't been getting many points off turnovers and we've been giving up too many.

But we're a very good free throw-shooting team, knock on wood. And we have to make sure we continue to do that and that we continue to get to the foul line, get in the bonus early. Obviously some of the fouls were -- I thought a big turning point was the foul on Jabri for three shots.

And I think that cut us to one or two. That was huge, huge, absolutely huge. And we gotta go to that line with confidence and we did.

Braelen made his late. He's way better than shooting in the 50s in the last week. He's way better than that. Goes 3-for-3 spent a lot of time on free throws and on the technique, and it paid off tonight.

Q. You referred earlier, you were saying not paying attention to the ghosts. At the beginning of the game, but you did have some crisis moments I guess with the [inaudible]. Where did the leadership on the floor come from to get you past that crisis stage with the jump balls?

COACH CREAN: I think it was collective, that Aaron has a real gift of urgency. He had the urgency yesterday and today and it carried out. When he's urgent he's highly confident. And it brings an urgent to our team.

I think when you're urgent you feel like you're not going to lose. Even when we're making some mistakes we just had to capitalize, we just had to capitalize.

We missed a couple of open people in the press. We hadn't been in that situation in a long time and we handled it. And we did a good job of it. Even though the jump balls were costly in one case, the play where they took the ball from Braelen that was a tough one. That was the only moment I got a little sick to my stomach and I go, oh, no. I got over that in about two seconds because we just gotta move right forward. And they did. So I'm really proud of the way they persevered.

Q. Talk about the points off the bench tonight. And I think y'all had 32 points inside the paint. Was that kind of the game plan to kind of jam it inside and get it away from those guards on the offensive --

COACH CREAN: We want to drive the ball. We want to post up. We want to do both. Right? So they weren't giving us the lane very much early on. And so we had to find different ways to get in there.

They do a really good job when you have two guys on the side to deal with the role, they get the guy all the way under the rim. They do a really good job of that. Last year they had Herb Jones in there. And now they have other guys. You have to find a way to move that guy. We weren't moving him early.

I think we were able to move him a little bit more but we kept the ball moving, which was the most important thing. It's not about the set that's called; it's about the ball movement and the body movement. We continued to have that.

I've said this a couple of times when it comes to Alabama, they're like the Golden State Warriors -- everyone thinks it's the 3-point shooting of Steph Curry and Klay Thompson that separates them. No, it's the layups they get.

The same for Alabama. They have a tremendous rep for shooting threes, and they do. Shackelford did a good job there. And I think one of the revisions in the second half was to go, starting with Jackson, going to more of a no-catch face guard situation.

Brian Fish made that recommendation to us in the coach's room, and it was a really good move because it stifled them just a little bit because he was too open in the first half with the five 3s.

I thought we did a pretty good job -- and I have to go watch film to be clear about this -- but I thought we did a pretty good job they started to break down and go to the basket, they were in the gaps. And we got beat on blow-bys a couple times, but when they were trying to isolate and get to the rim, we did a pretty good job playing sound defense.

If you're going to beat Alabama, you've got to win the game, you've got to win the points in the paint. And the fact that we were able to win the turnover points was an added bonus because we haven't done that very much this year. Last year we did a lot more of that. This year not so much. It was good to get it tonight.

Q. You said a minute ago that you just needed to get it going. Given the way of the world and the way of college basketball, the last few years with COVID and the portal and guys going pro and you having a whole new team year after year, has it just been difficult to get traction at Georgia in a way that nobody could have ever foreseen?

COACH CREAN: Yeah, I would say that. Because without traction you don't get sustainability. And traction's hard. It's really, really hard.

And there's been moments of it. And when you think about it, we've got the number one player in the draft, the best freshman in the country, and we were never able to go out and recruit to that.

Yes, you're recruiting on Zoom, but you're not going out in the public and being able to do that. And man, my other places where we had really good players, people not only could see them play, then you could go out and you could say, hey, you can do this, you can do that, you can be like this, like that. It gets harder in the Zoom area. But you just work through it, work through it. And what we have here are some really, really strong character kids.

I've said this before, and I think it bears repeating in the sense we just had the highest GPA that we've had in my three-plus years here this past semester. These kids are serious-minded about school. They're serious-minded about their work. They're serious-minded about their extra work. So it is hard to build cohesiveness. It is hard to get that chemistry that you want to have. And without that it's hard to get traction.

But you never find out if you don't get that win you gotta have to see if you can build on from it. And obviously we had that Memphis win and then the very next game we lose what was arguably our best player in Jailyn Ingram, certainly our most well-rounded player, when it came to maturity, experience, toughness, size, ability to play multiple positions and ability to guard multiple positions.

So you just have to keep working through it. That's why I don't get down. We just keep moving forward. If I'm down, they're down, we don't win tonight because we did not finish the game well at South Carolina. But we came back on Sunday, we came back on Monday with great resolve. And so they get the result tonight that we needed.

Q. Yesterday you talked about how a win tonight would get your team's confidence started. What's the next step in continue to go grow that confidence now looking forward to Vanderbilt?

COACH CREAN: I think that's it. Come back, practice well, get ready to play Vanderbilt. Hopefully have a healthy Kario Oquendo. We didn't have that the last time we played them. And we're still right there to win the game.

So this will do wonders for them. That doesn't mean we're going to win, but what it will do is it will do wonders for them as we move forward because now they have this under their belt. So you enjoy it. You process it. You learn from it and you get ready for the next one. That's all we'll do.

Q. You talked about it a little bit earlier, but can you talk a little bit more about the defensive adjustments that were made at halftime to drop their shooting percentage by almost 18 percent and the 3 --

COACH CREAN: I think the fact we wanted to make it harder for Shackelford to catch the ball. I think that was big. We wanted to make it much tougher for him to be open and put more emphasis on that. Because we certainly want to go -- when he's driving the ball, we want to bring traffic to him.

When he's standing there ready to shoot, it's really hard to help off because he's got such a quick release. I told him after the game, he's going to play 10, 12 years in the NBA. He's a really good player. And he can make shots like that. He beat us in here three years ago.

So a guy like that, he makes a difference. So we had to change it up a little bit. And I thought our coverages were pretty solid. I thought there were gaps. We took way the gaps defensively.

We didn't get hung up on our man. I'm sure I'm going to see some of that when I watch the film, but for the most part we didn't get hung up. That was big. And we were able to keep the ball moving offensively, use the entire width of the court in the half court. Got ahead a couple times. But we were able to get the ball, reverse, get some drive and kicks, get some reversals, get to the rim and get some fouls.