|
|||
|
|||
|
 |
|
|
ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE OPERATION BASKETBALLOctober 29, 2014Leonard HamiltonCHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA Q.  I asked your players about you earlier and they immediately smiled. You seem to be the type of guy that is able to bring out the best in his players. They play very emotionally for you on the floor. Talk about how you connect with your players on that level. LEONARD HAMILTON: Well, I've been very fortunate to have a great relationship with my guys. I try to be extremely patient and hold them accountable for the things that I expect them to be executing. Sometimes it works a lot better when they're older and more mature. We have a certain level of talent, and I think we do a great job as a staff evaluating who we are and what we are. We have been a pretty good basketball team when we've been inexperienced. We've tried to anchor our team with a sound fundamental defensive philosophy. Now, I feel that we have improved our offensive skills, and I think we'll be able to complement the defensive stops that we get off a lot better. I feel very good about this particular basketball team because we have a blend of‑‑ we have one senior and five juniors, and when we've been‑‑ when you look back at the last three years at the three teams that have won the ACC Championship have all been teams‑‑ we had six seniors in 2012, Miami had five seniors in 2013, and last year Virginia had a great mix of seniors and juniors. So I think that when our guys like Aaron and Montay, they respond a lot better, they're a little more confident, and I think that's who we are now. I think one of the reasons we've been able to get our guys to play with so much passion is because we have to. We have not been the most talented team in the ACC, but I think we've been able to respond appropriately and win enough games. Now hopefully with a little more depth and improved offensive skills, this will be another year where we will surprise a lot of people. Q. Even though the season hasn't started yet, how do you feel your team will stack up with the rest of the conference? LEONARD HAMILTON: Well, like I said earlier, we're extremely confident. Our system has worked well for us over the last nine years. We're the third winningest program in the ACC only behind Duke and Carolina, but we're not satisfied with being third. I think our goal is to be the top team in the ACC, and we're moving in that direction, but what is happening is everyone is getting better in the ACC. You can no longer just rest on your position that you're in because you can go in the wrong direction. So we know we need to turn it up a notch, but it does give us a certain amount of confidence that we've been able to be successful when we are playing the style that we think is necessary and we're consistent with it. Now, I think we have a level of maturity. One reason why I think we stack up pretty well is that we have an experienced bunch back, and now the challenge, the biggest challenge for us, is to bring our inexperienced players up to the level so they can be contributors as freshmen and sophomores, and I think that would make the difference in how successful we are as we move through the season. I think we have a pretty clear understanding of who we are with our older, more experienced players, but like most coaches, we're a little anxious with the freshmen that we have coming in that we need to really, really perform at a solid level in order for us to be successful. I have a hunch that we're going to be just fine. Q. When you look at this team, what have you taken away the most yourself? We talk about players learning, but what have you learned about your coaching style and your ability and how the team has responded to you over time? LEONARD HAMILTON: I think we have tremendous chemistry with this team. I have three seven‑footers that all love each other. They push each other in practice. They go at each other. They correct each other. They hang out together. There's competition among them, but there's no jealousy. They encourage and they lift each other up. Our two power forwards are a sophomore and a freshman. They get along just fine. They battle each other fiercely in practice, and they respond very well to their teammates. So I feel that the chemistry on this team will allow us to accelerate the process a little faster because they're responding and they're hungry. We went to the NCAA Tournament four years in a row, won the ACC title, and we lost our veterans, and now we've been a little inexperienced and we've come close, but we have not gone back to the NCAA. They realize now the culture that we've been able to establish at Florida State is at a point now where this needs to be our year for us to get back on track, so all those things I think are working in our favor. Q. How would you define Florida State basketball knowing that football is so prominent around the country? Where do you feel Florida State basketball is at compared to where you want it to be? LEONARD HAMILTON: Well, if you look on our campus now with all our sports, I think maybe we might have lost two games, maybe three, with all our fall sports. So not only is football good at Florida State, our athletic department and all our teams have done very well over a number of years. I've always been in my whole coaching career, I've been at schools that play tremendous football: Oklahoma State, Miami, Ohio State, so I think it really is an advantage for me to have that good name recognition with schools that go out and compete at the highest level in football, it keeps a good name in front of the public, and I think it makes it easier when you're out trying to sell your basketball program. But I'm not competing against our football program. I'm competing against the basketball programs in the ACC, and I think we all will say this, it's the No.1 college basketball conference ever assembled in the history of college basketball. Those are the guys who I'm competing against. It's an advantage for me to be at a school that has all of the sports participating at a high level. There's nothing but positives that come out of that. Q. With all the great teams and all the great players in this league, talk about how hard it is to prepare for all the different styles of basketball you're going to see this year. LEONARD HAMILTON: Well, to be very honest with you, even though you have to prepare, all the games on TV, we all have statistical analysis on every one, so that's the fun part of being prepared when you play against your opponents. But we've played basically a man‑to‑man defense, and we don't make‑‑ we make game time adjustments, but basically our defensive system would be basically the same. Offensively obviously we study our opponents. Someone plays us zone, someone pressures and someone plays us in man, that's why you practice all those things in the preseason so that you can make the adjustment when the season starts. But this is a great conference that's tremendously loaded with skill, talented players. That's why it's the best, and it's exciting from a player standpoint and from a coaching standpoint to have to match those wits with some of the best college basketball coaches and against some players at schools that are so rich with tradition it makes the atmospheres when you go on the road at such a tremendous level. So it's exciting, it's fun, it's tremendously challenging, but it's tough. That's why I say sometimes only the strong survive, but I think it's motivating, and that's why kids come to the ACC, to play in that type of environment. Q. If you were to give out a Most Improved award dating back from the loss in Minnesota to yesterday, whether it's conditioning, whether it's on the floor, who would you give that award to? LEONARD HAMILTON: There's no question that our conditioning level has improved, especially with our two international players, Bojanovsky and Michael Ojo. Michael, we had an event the other night, and Michael had the microphone, and he said he's glad he's at a point now where he can go up and down the court more than three times and ask to come out of the game. But most of his was emotional, and he gets excited. The game means an awful lot to him. But he's improved his vertical, he's improved his conditioning level. Bojanovsky has gotten much stronger where he's not being pushed around quite as much, and he goes against Michael Ojo every day. Michael is about 305 pounds but 4 percent body fat. He's the strongest person I've ever been around, and Bojanovsky is holding his own, and Kyle turn up is seven‑foot, 250, so there's a lot of physicality going on in there, but I think we've gotten stronger. I think overall our team has improved mentally and emotional where they're a lot more mature, I think they're more focused. I think they're hungrier. The practices are with a lot more intensity, and so I think we've improved in those areas. It would be very difficult to single out any one particular player, but Aaron Thomas, I feel that he's taken his game to another level. He's solid, always been a very good defender, but offensively he's shooting well. He's doing all the little things that I think we're going to need for him to do in order for us to be successful. Q. Do you benchmark after each practice? Do you benchmark after each month? How do you rate the performance level of your team throughout the year? LEONARD HAMILTON: Well, we keep statistics on all jump shots, all free throws, turnovers, rebounds, and those things in practice. At the end of the day I always evaluate them and tell them where they are and how many mistakes they've made, how many times we turned the ball over and try to keep them focused. We'll go back and watch films and kind of see where we are. Last week, for instance, I didn't like‑‑ we didn't like the progress we was making just in terms of us understanding what we should be looking for on the offensive end with the talent that we have. And so we've changed our focus. We have agreed where we had things that we have to get in every week. We kind of slow things down a little bit and want to go back and‑‑ and I think we came out of last week with a much better understanding of what we should be trying to accomplish on the offensive end. Our defense is a lot better. The challenge that we have now, we've got to become a better rebounding team, and we've got to take care of the ball. We're still turning the ball over a few times too many, but I think a lot of that was because we have two fresh young point guards that we're trying to break in, Rathan‑Mayes and Dayshawn Watkins, who guys who are not only trying to learn to play the point guard but they're trying to learn everyone else's position. That's the challenge we give our point guards so that they know what everyone else is doing, and they'll become accustomed to being aggressive offensively. We find them maybe being a little more aggressive offensively as opposed to creating for their teammates, and I think that's created a learning curve that we've got to overcome. Q. Besides Aaron Thomas who you alluded to, who else has really sharpened up their offense? LEONARD HAMILTON: Well, Devon Bookert has been more of a pass‑first point guard. I think he averaged eight points a game last year for a sophomore, we think that was pretty good because he was like the third or fourth‑leading scorer on our team. He's very capable. He's shot close to 50 percent for his freshman and sophomore year from the three‑point, and I think that tells you a lot that he's capable of doing a lot more for us offensively, but he's sacrificed because he's been our point guard. With Rathan‑Mayes, we can playboth of those guys off of the ball, which will give us a little bit more opportunity to turn Devon loose a little bit more and let him be a lot more aggressive offensively. And by nature we think Mayes is a very aggressive offensive player who's capable of giving us double figure points. Montay Brandon, who plays the wing, averaged about seven, eight points last year. He's right under 6'8". He's a much improved offensive player, so I think we're going to get more production from those guys, and just with the natural maturation of Bojanovsky and Michael Ojo and the return of Turpin, who has given us good solid play, we think that we'll have enough offense, if we play good defense, to be successful. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
About ASAP Sports •
FastScripts Archive •
Recent Interviews •
Captioning •
Upcoming Events •
Contact Us
FastScripts | Events Covered | Our Clients | Other Services | ASAP in the News | Site Map | Job Opportunities | Links |
|
ASAP Sports, Inc. | T: 1.212 385 0297
|