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ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE BASKETBALL MEDIA CONFERENCEFebruary 18, 2013Mark TurgeonCOACH TURGEON: Happy about the weekend, kids really competed and hopefully it will give us confidence moving forward. And we know Boston College is a much improved team like us from last year, playing a lot of young guys, and good at home. Lost to Miami by one and Duke by one at home and we know we have a heck of a challenge on our hands tomorrow night. Q. Did you happen to read or hear what Coach Chaney said about the rivalry, that it must not be as big of a deal for Maryland‑‑ COACH TURGEON: Yeah, I heard about it. Q. What are your thoughts? Do you have any comments about what he said? COACH TURGEON: Not really. It's his opinion. He's won a lot of games. He's our Olympic coach, he's won two Gold Medals; his opinion. Some people are going to like it, some people aren't. I'm really don't have a comment on it. Q. Moving on, going on the road, after winning a game like that, celebrated in the manner that it was, how difficult is it to guard against the letdown, especially going against a team that's played very well at home and very competitive with some big teams at home. COACH TURGEON: Yeah, they have been more competitive on the road, too. They have been a much better team. So, we'll see. We talked about it. We met last night and did some things. We'll see. With this young team, we are playing a lot of young kids like Boston College. You don't know how they are going to respond. We had great week of practice last week preparing, and not only prepared us for the Duke game but hopefully it's preparing us for the Boston College game. We've become a better road team the last few times on the road. So we know it's going to be tough. Duke won by one there and Miami won by one there and they are both top five teams in the country. We know it's not going to be easy but hopefully we'll respond better than we did after we beat a top team here at home last night, North Carolina State. Hopefully we'll play a little better on the road this time. Q. Last year Alex Len was young, a little bit on the raw side and developed as his season went on; how have you seen his skills in particular improve from last year to this year? COACH TURGEON: Well, he's always been skilled. He's just gotten stronger. He's gotten more confident and he's more comfortable. Of course, he was off the charts the other night. That's the best he's played in a long time, and both offensively and defensively and just being mentally into the game. He was as good as he's been in a long time. So we need him to play that way over the next month or so for us to finish strong. Same old stuff and he continues to work and we've really worked hard on his low post game. Because you know, that's the one thing that he really needed to work on, he's gotten better at it and more confident and stronger. I was proud of his defense, his rebounding and shot blocking and just his presence was great on Saturday. Q. Where is his ceiling? How good can he be? COACH TURGEON: Oh, we'll see. He loves it. He loves to work at it. He's 19, so he's got a huge upside. I think consistency is still a big thing with him. Mentally, you know, mental toughness is where we are working, listening skills, and then his physical toughness every day is where we need to go. He is 19; doesn't turn 20 until late June. He has a tremendous upside. It's been fun watching him improve and get better. I'm just proud of him for the other night, I've been on him pretty hard, he has not been producing the last few games the way he needs to produce, really the last month, and he was quite a presence out there on Saturday. Q. Do you have an update on Pe'Shon Howard? COACH TURGEON: He was put back on the team last night and he'll go with us to Boston College. Q. James said after the game that he took the fact that he had been stripped of the captaincy asking that he wanted everyone to be a leader. He did not take it personally. Was that the message to the team and have you ever done that before? COACH TURGEON: No, I haven't. Never done it before. Yeah, I wanted everybody to be a better leader. I just didn't think that we were doing a good job with it. Now with, that said, I've stripped it but James is still trying to be a leader, Dez is still trying to be a leader and I'm just trying to help out a lot more. James is a mature kid. He's handled it the right way. Responded great. Obviously played well in the game. He knows he still has a responsibility in the locker room when I'm not around, the dorm rooms, to make sure these guys are doing what's wrong. Q. Following up on Pe'Shon, regardless of what happened Saturday night, the fact that you won, do you think that gets the message to a guy, missing out on something like that? COACH TURGEON: Yeah, probably does. You'd think it would. So you know, he's been punished and we welcome him back with open arms, and hopefully he's learned from his mistakes and hopefully our players have learned, other players have learned from his mistakes. And we talked about that last night as a team. And you know, would need Pe'Shon. We need a mature, confident, Pe'Shon moving forward for us to finish strong here. Q. Quick question about Jake Layman. One of the things‑‑ management expectations with him, and sort of changing your coaching philosophy about how you sort of approach‑‑ talk about the methods you use? COACH TURGEON: Obviously Jake played on the Under 18 team this summer and that put even bigger expectations on him coming in. I don't think he was the highest‑rated kid we saw but there was a lot of expectations because of that. He missed a month in the summer, and we worked hard in the summer, having a young team, so he was behind, missed a month in the weight room, so he was behind. It took time, and then I realized that you can't scream and yell at Jake a lot. You need to be a positive influence on him. And we've hit that approach. I'm sure he still thinks they yell at him, which I'm sure I do at times. Just try to handle him a little bit better, giving him confidence. The thing about Jake is Jake brings it every day. It's not like Jake wasn't trying hard or took a day off or had a bad attitude. He's a very humble kid and just continued to work hard. Those guys are fun to work with, and you know, his upside is huge. He's really come a long ways and he's helped us play a tremendous amount of minutes the other night against Duke and will play a lot of minutes as we move forward. I think he gets just a little bit better every day that we are able to coach him. Q. You've seen Plumlee and Green and Larkin this year, who is going to get your ACC vote and what criteria are you going to use? COACH TURGEON: I don't know yet, six games left, all having great years; no, I think winning is the most important criteria. So Larkin and Plumlee are right there. But Green is pretty special, having a tremendous year obviously. I didn't even think about that, I'm sorry, but when it comes time to vote, it will probably come down to one of those three guys and we'll see how the next five or six games goes. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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