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MOUNTAIN WEST CONFERENCE MEN'S TOURNAMENTMarch 12, 2015Alex DavisRodney TerryPaul WatsonLAS VEGAS, NEVADA Colorado State – 71 THE MODERATOR: We're joined by Fresno State. Coach, some thoughts on tonight's game. COACH TERRY: I'd like to give Colorado State a lot of credit tonight. His team played the way they played all year long. They played as a team. They really competed at a whole 'nother level. I like to think of those guys are one of the better effort teams in the country. They competed on both ends of the floor. They have a physical mindset in terms of rebounding the basketball. They made shots tonight. They made plays. We give them a lot of credit. They've had a great year. THE MODERATOR: We'll take questions for the student‑athletes. Q. You were down 18 at halftime but cut it to six points at one point in the second half. What do you think that says about the team? What was your mindset coming out of halftime? ALEX DAVIS: Coming out of halftime, our mantra was just to go out and play hard. We had to come out, we had to come out fighting. We got ourselves down in a hole early. We had some pretty good shots that we missed. We missed some pretty good shots that we normally make, got down in the hole. Come out in the second half, play hard. There's no need to hold back now. I think we did a pretty good job coming out in the second half, making our run, showing Fresno State we a great team. We still got fight in us. I think we just couldn't finish the plays we needed to finish in order to win this game. Q. Talking to you yesterday, I think you mentioned yesterday about making a run to the championship game. Do you think you guys as a team believe that? ALEX DAVIS: Of course. We worked all season, all spring, last year. This is a pretty good team. It's just the fact that I don't think we had the games where we played great together. It's a really good team, a really athletic team. I really feel like we could make a run. I'm pretty sure Paul would agree with me, we feel like we could win a championship, because we have that caliber of team. We have a lot of guys coming back next year. I think they going to be a really, really good team next year. They going to be a force to reckon with next year. Q. When Avila went down, how did that change things? Did you think you had a better shot? PAUL WATSON: You know, seeing Avila go down, you never want to see a good player go down. It's always nice to play against a team when they're at their best. You don't want to win a game when one of the key players on the other team is down. At that point I feel Colorado State, they picked up the intensity down the line. I mean, the bench, they came off, picked up for Avila. They played harder. They played more intense. Q. Paul, what, if anything, do you think was missing from you guys tonight? PAUL WATSON: Probably coming out from the jump. We didn't really come out with the intensity we needed like we did in the second half on the defensive end. We missed, like Alex said, some key shots that we usually make. That hurt us in the beginning. THE MODERATOR: We'll dismiss the student‑athletes at this time. Thank you. We'll continue with questions for Coach Terry. Q. What is Marvelle Harris' condition? COACH TERRY: I don't have a prognosis for him right now right off the bat. There's going to be some further evaluation into the night where he is right now. We've got him with really good people that will do a great job with him. But I don't have an answer right now. Q. He did hit his head? COACH TERRY: He did. Q. Too soon to say if he had a concussion? COACH TERRY: I think, with the climate, you're going to take the precautionary measures to have his best interests in mind in terms of what happened, the consequences, the situation that arose there. It's hard to say what it is right now. We'll deal with it. Q. Looking at the final stats, pretty big discrepancy in fouls and free throws. How, at all, do you think that affected the outcome of the game? COACH TERRY: Well, I think it's two teams that played with great effort. Those guys played with really, really good effort. I think our team is a good effort team. Any time you have teams that play with that kind of mindset, as much as we pride ourselves with hard‑nosed defense, they pride themselves with how they play. You're going to have a large number of fouls throughout the course of the game. It's going to be a physical game. Playing a team like Colorado State, you have to exceed their effort. The games we lost to them, they won the effort battles. They did again tonight. Q. When they're sitting here talking about not coming out from the jump, that being pretty much the same thing that haunted you against them back in Fresno a month ago, how frustrating is that? COACH TERRY: Well, I think the frustrating thing would be, you know, we missed some shots that we, I mean, point‑blank, we work on really finishing. We finish those, it's a whole different game. You know, when you miss shots like that, point‑blank, it kind of deflates you a little bit defensively, now you're back on your heels a little bit. But we regrouped, had the game still right where we wanted it. We had a six‑minute stretch in the half where things got away. Give them credit, they made some shots. I give my guys a lot of credit. We came out after halftime and said, Hey, we're going to have to put it on our defense, we're not worried about our offense right now. We're going to guard as hard as we can guard on every single possession, we'll be right where we need to be in this ballgame. We cut it to a two‑possession game. Give them credit again, they made another big play. Q. After Avila went out, they were hitting all those threes, you were in zone. Was that something you changed when he went out? COACH TERRY: They're a really good offensive team, a difficult team to guard with their motion offense. We played 80 minutes prior to tonight of man‑to‑man defense against them. They're extremely hard to guard. I don't think we played one possession of zone against them. Any time you play a team twice, you have to find a competitive edge, how can we disrupt what they were able to do the two previous games. I thought the game plan that the coaches and our staff had defensively to start the game was a good game plan for us. We were in a good position. On makes we were back in zone, on misses we were man‑to‑man, just to throw them out of their rhythm a little bit. We probably won five or six possessions straight in zone before they started making shots. Anytime a team gets comfortable in zone, we have to go back to man. We went back and played our traditional man‑to‑man defense. Q. How would you rate your team's play in transition, especially the second half? COACH TERRY: Much better than the first half. We actually got some really good stops and then we turned the ball over. We didn't play advantage basketball early in the ballgame and in the first half particularly well. Second half we were much better. We had better spacing. Guys were in attack mode, looking to finish. We were more efficient in the second half than the first half. Q. Guys missed a lot of shots in the end of the game. What was the reason for that? COACH TERRY: I think this group did learn to work the game for 40 minutes, working it, working it, working it, keep playing till the horn goes off. We did, we missed some shots obviously that didn't go down for us, and they made some. You have to tip your hat to them in that regard. Marvelle Harris, a guy we've leaned on all year long, didn't have the kind of night we needed him to have. When that happens, other guys have to step up. We didn't get that contribution all the way around. Q. Marvelle Harris, to me after he missed a couple early, he was a little hesitant to take some shots after that. Was that one of the biggest differences in the game? COACH TERRY: He played probably the most minutes in this league of any player. He's done so many positive things for us over the course of this season. Even tonight when he didn't have his A game going in terms of making shots, he was still a positive leader with our guys. Somebody else has to step up and do this. We're still doing this defensively. He did let him take himself completely out of the game. I always say to guys, How else are you going to affect the game? I thought he stayed into the game, in tune to what was going on even though he didn't have his best defensive game. Q. From your perspective, facing a team for the third time where the other two outcomes both went the same way, how difficult is it for another team to beat a team three times in one season? COACH TERRY: That's arguably the toughest matchup you could have in this tournament, to be honest with you. I'm not taking anything away from any other team that's still playing right now. That's a physical mindset team, an older team there that can really score the basketball and rebound the basketball and they can guard. You have any of those combinations, that's an NCAA tournament team. They have been all year long. It's a hard matchup for us all year. For us to take the next step in our program to compete with those guys, we're going to have more of a physical mindset likewise. We have some talent on our team, but the next step for us is to take the next step, and that's what they've been able to do. Q. You've had ups and downs this season, what is your perspective on the season as a whole? COACH TERRY: I was proud of the way our guys came out and kept competing. We didn't get off particularly well the start of the season with the way we wanted to for a number of different reasons. I said to our guys in the locker room a second ago I was proud of the way they carried themselves. It was easy for a team going through what we went through early in the year to completely go the other way. End up with seven, six wins on the year. We took that and built on that, got better. We really became a team over the last three weeks. To win 10 games in this league, this is a really good league top to bottom, and it will be from here on out. Mountain West Conference is one of the best leagues in the country. For us to come back and have the perseverance to get ten wins in this league and compete at the level we compete in, with the start we got off to, I can't fault our effort. I thought our guys really hung together. Can we be better as a team next year as a team? Absolutely. If we buy into that and do that over the off‑season, we'll be as good as anybody in our league next year. That's the continued growth curve with our program and what we are. THE MODERATOR: Thank you very much, coach. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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