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PUERTO RICO TIP-OFF MEDIA CONFERENCENovember 14, 2013Dan ShoemakerTIM SIMMONS: Dan, good morning. DAN SHOEMAKER: How are you? TIM SIMMONS: Doing well. Give us a little background and Puerto Rico and the tournament that you kind of fathered seven years ago in Puerto Rico. DAN SHOEMAKER: Well, it's hard to believe that this is the seventh tournament coming up. It's been a great experience there. The city of San Juan has really embraced it. The island of Puerto Rico has really embraced the tournament. We'll play this year in the Roberto Clemente Coliseum, one of the great venues on the island, the most historic venue on the island, certainly named after Roberto Clemente, right next to the baseball stadium there, part of the complex that includes the Las Americas mall, which is the largest shopping center in the Caribbean. If anybody on the call is looking to have a good time, I suggest they come down. It's a great place to be. We have, I think, one of our best fields this year, really outstanding teams this year in Michigan, Kansas State, Charlotte, who I saw play a couple of nights ago, is very good, Northeastern, Georgetown, who just played for us in Korea, they're making the trip from Korea back home and then down to Puerto Rico. I hope they get in early and get their legs back under them. But those kids are going to have a lot of miles. Long Beach, VCU, which had the best last‑second win over the University of Virginia the other night, and Florida State coming off of a win big last night, and if you had a chance to see that game, I think people really will be excited about watching the Florida State team play. This is a great field. We are really excited about it. I think it might be‑‑ it's certainly one of the best if not the best fields in all of the MTEs this year. TIM SIMMONS: Kind of give the folks an idea how the brackets were prepared for the tournament. We announced in late July or early August, but kind of how was the bracket set up? DAN SHOEMAKER: You know, we always go through our fields when we complete them and try to, as best we can, kind of seed the teams. You try to pick a No.1 and No.2 and No.3. That's difficult to do. Number one, I'll be the first to admit that those of us that kind of work that through, we're not the best experts on strength and strength of schedule and that kind of thing, and in basketball you always get a little bit surprised and injuries play into it so much. So we took a look at the match‑ups we think work from a power standpoint, and at the same time the teams have the opportunity to play a fourth game in this tournament that is not bracketed. So we try to make sure that if the teams do elect to play each other as a fourth game that they're not bracketed against each other in the bracketed portion of the tournament. There are a lot of things that we take into consideration, but we really try to make this an old‑style tournament. The ESPN multi‑team events are really just about the only events left that bring teams to a neutral floor and crown a champion, and we really try to be as true as we can to the old‑school model of the holiday tournament, and you're going to see a great one in San Juan this year. Q. Talk about what the addition of Charlotte brings this year to the tournament? DAN SHOEMAKER: I saw Charlotte play against the College of Charleston, who is in our Puerto Rico tournament next year and in our Anaheim event coming up over Thanksgiving. Really good, young basketball team. But Charlotte I thought really strong. They had two kids out that I believe will be available for the Puerto Rico tournament. They've got one of the best young big men in the country at center, really a quality player, very physical team, a good a point guard as you'll see on any college team in the country this year in Pierriá Henry. I think they add a tremendous amount to the tournament this year, very physical team, very athletic team. They're exciting to watch, and I think they're going to be capable of playing with and beating anybody in the tournament. This is a field, quite frankly, that I think there's four or five teams that could win this thing. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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