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STATE FARM MISSOURI VALLEY CONFERENCE MEN'S TOURNAMENTMarch 4, 2016Dan MullerDevaughn Akoon-PurcellMiKyle McIntoshSt. Louis, Missouri - Arch Madness Indiana State-65, Illinois State-57 THE MODERATOR: MiKyle McIntosh and DeVaughn Akoon-Purcell for Illinois State. Dan Muller is in the middle. COACH MULLER: Congratulations to Greg and Indiana State. They certainly outplayed us today. I just feel bad that I couldn't help these guys more tonight. I certainly couldn't offensively, and it's certainly a tough loss. Love these guys. They've tried to do everything we've asked, and it wasn't our night. What can you say? Q. For DeVaughn and MiKyle, could you just talk about their defensive effort. Were they doing things that you guys just were a little hesitant on tonight, maybe something you hadn't seen from them earlier? DEVAUGHN AKOON-PURCELL: Yeah, I think it kind of affected us tonight. Guys were guessing whether they should drive, shoot, or what play we should make tonight, and we were stagnant, and it hurt us. MIKYLE McINTOSH: Like DeVaughn said, they were packing it in and it was hard to drive. They got us with a couple -- just packing it in and stuff like that. We weren't moving on offense as we usually do. Q. DeVaughn, you guys fell behind early in the second half. How tough of a hole -- I mean, you're only down seven at the half. That really wasn't too bad, especially the way you guys shot. But falling behind right at the start of the second half and digging yourselves a hole, how tough was it to come out of the rest of the way? DEVAUGHN AKOON-PURCELL: It was definitely hard to come back out of that, especially with them being in the gaps the way they were. We tried to adjust for it a little bit. We just still came up short. Q. MiKyle, people will look at it and see you guys beat them by 28 the last time, and maybe think you might have taken them a little bit lightly. Could you kind of address that. MIKYLE McINTOSH: Us beating them by 28 has nothing to do with tonight. It's a whole new season when we come into the conference tournament. I don't know if I can say it for the whole team that we took them lightly or not, but I think they just came with a different plan that we weren't prepared for. At the same time, we could have done better as a team, as players. We just didn't. Q. For both of you guys, 33 three-point shots tonight, and sometimes you're shooting up because you're coming from behind, but did you guys maybe settle for threes too often tonight? MIKYLE McINTOSH: Yeah, definitely, we did settle for threes tonight, especially early on. They started packing up the paint and playing off of us, so we thought that we should just shoot it because we were open. Some of the shots we took weren't the right shots for the team. That was just about it. DEVAUGHN AKOON-PURCELL: I'll say I feel the same with them packing it in. Everybody was jacking up shots early, and they weren't falling. So then people felt like they had to do something different because it still wasn't working. Q. DeVaughn, could you just talk a little bit about the rally. You guys cut it, I think, to four at one time there. I think you even had a shot maybe to get it for three. Kind of what was going on, really the mood of the team at that point. It seemed like everybody was finally kind of really getting into it. DEVAUGHN AKOON-PURCELL: I felt like at that point everybody was locked in and ready to make plays defensively and offensively. We just came up short. Q. Coach, long season, lots to look back on. How would you assess your performance throughout the season? COACH MULLER: Right now that's tough, I would say. To play the way we did tonight and to finish our conference and conference tournament chances, it's kind of tough to have the little kind of retrospect backwards right now. I'm sure, once we get a little bit of separation from this, these guys did some really good things. We just picked a heck of a night to have our worst offensive night in probably three months and to play the way that we did. Q. Dan, could you just talk a little bit about their defensive scheme that they came out with tonight. The guys looked hesitant the whole 30 minutes really. COACH MULLER: Yeah, they were really packed in hard, and we've seen that. We haven't seen it much recently, but they played us almost like we play. It was kind of a mirror of each other. That's why the numbers are so bad in the first half, but our turnovers are what killed us. I think the pressure got to us a little bit once we got a deficit. We tried to talk about continuing to play and stay in the moment and not get frustrated, but we had a lot of frustrated play. I think they felt like the deficit was bigger than it really was early, which can happen late in the season. So as I said, I didn't do a good enough job for getting these guys' mindsets right for postseason play. A seven-point lead, a five-point lead, that's nothing, but I think it felt like a lot because of our offensive struggles. And I think that carried over a little bit to the defensive end, specifically at the start of the second half. The teams packed it in. You've got to make some shots. We took some quick ones, but we took a lot of good ones that we missed. Q. Like you said, just the start of that second half, when they scored seven points right off the gun, did that, like you say, kind of even dent the confidence even more? COACH MULLER: Well, I would say so. That was probably the biggest disappointment to me was the start of that second half because we talked about things. Hey, we're good. We've got to do these things. We've got to make these adjustments. Then we came out and clearly weren't focused like you need to be in that situation. We've been in that situation before. Guys have been great. I know they all wanted to do right, but when you start trying to make plays kind of for yourself, that can backfire, specifically the way we were being played. It was ugly basketball offensively for us. Really proud of some of the guys, the way they fought, but we had a lot of guys not have very good nights. Q. Coach, would you mind touching on some of those halftime adjustments, mind sharing that with all of us, please. COACH MULLER: Yeah, we talked. One of them said, our offense is so stagnant. We're not moving like we're supposed to move, and we're not cutting like we're supposed to cut. So we talked about it a lot in the first half. When teams pack it in that much, you've got to have some movement off the ball, and we weren't out. When you're frustrated as a player, you can't think about what you're supposed to be doing because you're worried about what happened, and we had a lot of that tonight, unfortunately. I didn't do a good enough job of helping them with it. But you need movement. You need the right passage. You need solid pivots and passes, and we weren't making those. Q. Dan, what kind of postseason options might be on the table for Illinois State? COACH MULLER: You know, I'm not sure. I'm really not sure. I know there's some possible options if we're invited to certain things. We certainly will probably turn some things down if we are invited, but I'm not really positive what we might do yet. Q. Dan, had you gotten any sense, I mean in practice the last few days, I mean, did you feel like these guys were in the right mindset and were ready to play better? COACH MULLER: I really did. We had a terrific practice yesterday. We had a really good shootaround today. It was such a long day, we did some things to try to take their mind off it a little bit, but they had rest. We had a good week of practice. They wanted it. They wanted to do right. You can see the way we played most of the conference season, but I'll tell you what, that pressure at the end of the season with a little bit of lack of confidence, and it just snowballed for us. And we had too many guys that couldn't really snap out of it. Q. At the end of the day, it's just a bad shooting night. Can you wrap it up to just that? COACH MULLER: A lot of it. Because, if you make some of those shots, they have to change the way they play. We made the wrong -- our turnovers killed us. We could have even managed our 30 percent shooting without our turnovers that led to breakouts and easy baskets for them, because until they started the second half, we were guarding them. We led the league in three-point percentage and three-point shooting, surprisingly to me, but we had some good shooters that didn't shoot it very well. That's not the only thing certainly, but if you make some of those open step-ins that we had, I think it's a different game. Q. Dan, I apologize if you've been asked this, but Indiana State defensively was able to get their hands in on some of your penetrators, and you know, just elaborate on the effect that had on the game. COACH MULLER: That really got us frustrated, and we were trying to drive the ball on the first pass too often, and that's what I was talking about. We needed movement off the ball, and we just couldn't get consistent movement for whatever reason. They were packing it in. That ball was being driven, and guys were attacking the ball off the gaps, and we weren't making good, smart, solid basketball plays. I don't know how many run outs or easy baskets they got out of that, but it certainly hurt us. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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