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STATE FARM MISSOURI VALLEY CONFERENCE MEN'S TOURNAMENTMarch 5, 2016Gregg MarshallAnton GradyFred VanVleetRon BakerSt. Louis, Missouri - Arch Madness Northern Iowa - 57, Wichita State - 52. GREGG MARSHALL: Well, that was a great defensive ballgame, and congratulations to UNI. They played well, and they made one more play than us in a game that was back and forth, great defense on both sides, and Ben's team played really well. I wish we'd have made one more shot, but I'm sure we'll discuss that. Q. Fred and Ron, could you describe their defense and the kind of obstacles and frustrations that they present? RON BAKER: They really heat the ball up right around the three-point line, force you to drive it into gaps. They over-help and make you make extra passes, and they flood the ball really well and force you to take contested jumpers, maybe forced jumpers, and they did a good job tonight. FRED VANVLEET: Yeah, like Ron said, they definitely guard the gaps. They did a good job tonight, and I mean, they make you make open shots, and we didn't do that. The more shots you miss, the more confidence they get, and the better the defense becomes, and the tighter they're able to pack it in when you go 2-for-24. But anytime I don't play well, our team usually doesn't do well. So I mean, give Northern Iowa all the credit in the world for that, but I just wasn't very good today. Q. Fred, could you talk about the match-up you had with Wes today at the point guard position. FRED VANVLEET: Yeah, it's always fun playing against Wes. He's a heck of a player. I just love the way he competes. I thought I did a pretty good job on him when we were going one-on-one or whatever. They did a lot of things to get different match-ups and run different guys at us to get him on a different guy to give us a different look, and he was able to take advantage of some of those match-ups down the stretch. I mean, the kid just made the winning plays that he needed to make, so give him a lot of credit. Q. Anton, you were able to find the open spots and knocked down some jumpers. How were you able to get open against their defense? ANTON GRADY: It was something that coach had put in today in shoot-around. He tried to ice Fred on the sideline. He put in a new play for us, and the play was just for a 15-foot jump shot or swing it to the opposite wing and I was able to knock that shot down today. Q. Fred, could you take us through that second-to-last possession of overtime, you're down 55-52, ended up throwing cross-court to Conner. What was the play coming out of the timeout? FRED VANVLEET: We had a play drawn up, and it was a good play, and I came off and was trying to make my read, and I just didn't make it quite fast enough and got in a tough spot and threw it to Conner, put him in a terrible position. Just need to execute well both plays down the stretch. I don't care what offense it is, anytime your point guard is not doing the right thing, it's not going to work out for you. Q. If you could all just talk about, seems like you're probably in the NCAA Tournament, but it's probably going to be kind of a tense week. How do you get through this week not knowing? ANTON GRADY: Well, all we can do is hope that we get in the Tournament and believe that we did enough during the regular season and get back in the gym and work on things that we didn't execute good today and try to get better as a team and work towards getting better. RON BAKER: For me, I feel like we're in a tournament. I'm not on the inside, so I don't know what they're talking about, discussing, but for us, we can just move on from this game, look at film, work on shooting the basketball, work on our craft, try and do things a little bit better to get our team ready for postseason play. FRED VANVLEET: I think both those guys said it good. I'm optimistic but that's just my personality. So you hope that you've done enough, but that was our whole goal coming into this weekend, to not be in this position and be on the other side of it playing for a chance to lock it up tomorrow. I think we're all pretty disappointed that we came up short. But in terms of what do you do throughout the week, you just first look at the film, then look in the mirror, and third, just go to work. Q. Ron and Fred, last time you guys played against UNI you guys struggled from the field. Is there anything in particular they do or their defenders do? RON BAKER: Nothing I can describe in words what they do. A lot of our points come when we get paint touches, and they helped really well when you get to the paint. A lot of our looks I'm sure on film look wide open. It's just us and the rim. Today, especially me, I wasn't able to step up, one-two in my shot and get a basket when my team needed me, and a lot of that is on my shoulders. FRED VANVLEET: I mean, they play the gaps and they're not out denying much, they just clog the paint and make it hard for you to drive, make it hard to cut, things like that. I mean, they pretty much give you open jumpers, and if you make them, it kind of spreads them out a little bit more. If you don't, like I said, it gets tighter and tighter and tighter. But at the end of the day, 2-for-24 is not going to get it done, and 3-for-14 for a starting point guard is not going to get it done in two days here in St. Louis. Q. Fred, I mean, it was such a defensive struggle, both teams playing -- extending or expending a lot of energy to play defense. And both teams didn't shoot the ball well. I know defense has something to do with that, obviously, but I wonder from a player standpoint if the amount of energy that's expended in a defensive struggle like that impacts the shooting? FRED VANVLEET: Yeah, it's definitely hard. Anytime you're playing that hard on the defensive end and you do get a stop, you get to go on the other end, so your legs definitely wear down. But that's not an excuse to not make the right plays or at least to execute. Fatigue doesn't really have much to do with executing; that's all mental. So you may lose your legs on a jumper, but that doesn't stop you from executing whatever we're running and trying to get a good look. I thought we settled a couple times, and myself especially, late, and kind of helped them out, too, as great as they were defensively, we helped them out quite a bit. Q. Gregg, it just appeared that you spent 45 minutes today looking for somebody who could make a basket. How frustrating was that? How much different things did you use to try to get to the point where you could score a little more easily? GREGG MARSHALL: We used just about everything that we have offensively. What we didn't do is get anything off of their defense. They don't pass the ball a lot. It's just hard to get in passing lanes. They do a lot of dribbling, and then Wes Washpun kind of makes a play at the end. We weren't able to turn them over very much, and so points off transition was few and far between. Our 5 men combined today to go 10-for-15. So they got 15 shots, made 10 of them, but we couldn't get it to them in the end. For whatever reason, they changed the way they were defending or all the different offenses that we employed, we stopped looking inside. But we probably -- I'm going to go back and guess, when I watch the video, that we had two or three bad shots from the three-point line, but the other 21, I mean, they were pretty good looks. Normally those guys knock them in, but you've just got to credit UNI, their defensive philosophy and their game plan and their execution. We take credit when we hold teams, so they get a lot of credit for that. Q. Coach, two services right now have you firmly on the bubble. One has you in, one has you out. Obviously it's very subjective. How do you as a coach and your staff handle championship week watching these conference tournaments? A, will you watch them, and what do you say to your kids? GREGG MARSHALL: Well, I think we just talked about that. We're going to play again. It's going to be the NCAA Tournament, and if not, the NIT. You know, we'll take a couple of days off and then we'll get in the gym and we'll break down the film and we'll practice and we'll shoot the ball a lot, and then we will wait. This team was 2-4 in November after Fred VanVleet missed the tournament in Florida. He was limping around at Tulsa. He wasn't healthy probably until sometime in December, late December maybe. But at that point we had lost five games, and since then we've lost three. We've won a lot of them, too. I think a lot of people when they watch our team play, they know that we can really defend, and tonight we couldn't score, and you've got to do both to beat a good team. UNI is a good team. They've proven that against some great teams in this land this year. I'll watch it. I love college basketball. I'll watch a lot of games, and I'll try to learn and try to get better. A lot of teams lost today. If there's a bubble, it's a big one, and a lot of teams' bubbles burst today, so maybe we're one of them, I don't know. But a lot of teams that were so-called on the bubble going into today lost. Q. You guys ran out to a big lead. Can you talk a little bit about the adjustments that Jacobson made to try to get you guys back in it? GREGG MARSHALL: Well, he called a time-out. It was 8-0, and he steadied the ship. That's what a good coach does. I guess he didn't want to wait for the media, and they changed the way they were attacking our two-thirds-court press. They had a couple of pretty good looks early, and they just didn't knock them in. But later on, they got a couple of threes to go. I think they even banked one in. Someone banked one in, and I've been doing this a long time. My history, when one team is struggling to make a shot and the other one banks one in, the team that banks one in usually wins, and that happened today. Q. After a couple losses in the conference, you really got it rolling, dominating style. Looked like you had gotten through whatever difficulties. Are you surprised that you didn't play better over here? GREGG MARSHALL: You know, it's been a lot of ebb and flow in the season. You never know why. I'll say this: The way the bracket broke this year, there was no advantage to being the 1 seed. I mean, Loyola was about as good an 8 seed as you're going to see. Loyola beat UNI twice. They were predicted to be fourth or fifth in the preseason poll. They just struggled early. Porter did a great job of righting his ship, switched his lineup. That was a tough 8 seed. Then you get UNI, the hottest team in the second half in the league, in the semis. Just the way the bracket broke, there was no easy game. There was no game where you could have a night like we had offensively and survive. Q. Coach, the decision to have Markis switch onto Wes in overtime? GREGG MARSHALL: Yeah, we were doing that quite a bit throughout the game, and Wes scored seven baskets. I don't know how many he scored on Marcus. But I know he scored one when we went to a switch. Conner had him some, Fred had him the most. They keep doing those hand-offs and ball screens until they get the match-up that they like. Wes Washpun is a very talented and athletic player. He's a dynamic guard. He scored seven baskets more than anyone else in the game other than Anton Grady. Q. Is Fred physically all right? Any issues he's been having? GREGG MARSHALL: You know, he puts a heating pad on his hamstring, but I think he's been healthy for a while. I'm not saying he's 100 percent healthy; who is? Are you 100 percent healthy? I'm not, either. But by and large, I think he's good to go. But he does heat before the game, and he'll get some treatment from the trainers daily on his hamstring. But yeah, that's not a factor at this point I don't think. Q. As you're sitting listening to Fred talk and obviously putting a lot of the responsibility for this loss on his shoulders, what do you think as you hear him say that? GREGG MARSHALL: Well, I don't want him to blame himself at all. The buck stops with me. It's my fault. That's the way I've always done it for 18 years, nine years at Winthrop and now nine years at Wichita State. We win as a team, but when we lose, it's my fault. I coach these guys really hard, but I love them. They're great kids. They're unbelievable representatives of our university and our city and our state, and they'll get back up off the mat. We're going to play. I hope it's the NCAA Tournament because frankly I think we can win several games in the NCAA Tournament. But we have to be given that opportunity, and unfortunately, when he missed those handful of games early, those were our marquee games. Those are the games that you have to win to get an at-large from a conference like the Missouri Valley, and we ended up beating a pretty good UNLV team handily -- well, not handily, we beat Utah handily, we beat UNLV in a pretty close game, when they were playing well early in the year. But other than that, he missed the bulk of our preseason conference, came back, and probably about 80 percent, and we lost a game in overtime at Seton Hall. But I don't know. I won't be sitting in that room. I hope people have watched us play during the course of our season. We've won 24 games, and we went -- what did we go, 17-3 in this league? Played nine on the road and two on neutral court. It's a pretty good league. So we'll see. Again, I hope that they get an opportunity to play in the big dance, but if not, I'm sure they'll try to win the NIT. Q. Anton talked about adjustments that got him open and he was pretty effective. Can you describe those a little bit more? GREGG MARSHALL: Yeah, they like to what we call ice-ball screens, and they do a great job of that, so we were just trying to alleviate a little pressure when they would ice the ball screen, we would pop the big guy to the 18-foot range around the foul line, and basically there's no one there, so it's -- you can shoot it, you can drive it, but then again, it's a 5 man that you're asking to do that, but Anton has those abilities. He shoots the ball very well, and just a little wrinkle that the staff came up with, and it was effective. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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