|
|||
|
|||
|
 |
|
|
STATE FARM MISSOURI VALLEY CONFERENCE MEN'S TOURNAMENTMarch 5, 2016Ben JacobsonJeremy MorganKlint CarlsonWes WashpunSt. Louis, Missouri - Arch Madness Northern Iowa - 57, Wichita State - 52. BEN JACOBSON: What a game. It was as good a game as I've been a part of. Guys on both teams making plays down the stretch and making plays in overtime. I mean, there was a lot of good players on that floor. Baker took his turn, Wes and VanVleet went back and forth and back and forth. You saw it, what a great game. Just really proud of our guys, really proud of our guys. It was a tough start to the basketball game for us, and the guys were fired up a little bit around the 10-minute mark in the first half, but we've learned to deal with each other, so we're making it. But a great game. Q. Wes, you've been a part of some big wins this year. Where does this one rate on that list? WES WASHPUN: Oh, man, I don't think I've really processed them enough to go through and rate them all, but they're all really special, and this one ranks right up there with all the other ones. What a game. That's all I can say, really. Q. Wes, you've gotten out for these situations several times now. Is there something that is in your DNA or is there something that you think about in these moments that make you rise to the occasion? WES WASHPUN: I just want to go out there and play as hard as I can for my team, is really what it comes down to. I just tried to make the play, Coach puts the ball in my hands, and tells me to go out there and make a play, and that's all I try to do out there. Q. Going to the ball screen there in the second half, why did you go to it at that particular time and why was it so effective? WES WASHPUN: They were switching a little bit there, which helped us get some favorable match-ups on the ball screen and the one-on-one there at the top of the key. Coach did a good job of figuring that out and putting us in a position where we had shooters all around me, and I could get in there and spray it out to them or get all the way out to the rim and finish. Q. Jeremy, you missed a shot late in the second half and then you came back in overtime and hit a spot from almost the same place. Take me through the last one, the one you hit with about a minute to go in overtime. JEREMY MORGAN: Yeah, you know, the whole game the guys and Coach were telling me, you know, the next one is going to go in. Just keep shooting it, stay confident. And I took a look at the shot clock there and it was getting down there. So when Wyatt passed it to me, I knew I had to shoot it, so I just let it go with confidence, and it went in. Q. Jeremy, when you're taking that shot you know Wes is just getting buckets back and forth, back and forth. What does it say about your confidence to be able to take that knowing that Wes is in the middle of a really hot streak? JEREMY MORGAN: I just know that all my teammates and the whole team has confidence in me to shoot that shot. That's just what I did was shoot it with confidence. Q. Klint, people have questioned the strength of your front court this year. What do you think it says about you and Bennet the way you performed against Wichita State's front line today? KLINT CARLSON: Yeah, it says a lot. I know the rest of the team and Coach Jake, they have all the confidence in the world for me and Bennett and we have it for each other, so it feels good to be able to come out and compete with some of the best. Q. Klint, your rebounding, particularly down the stretch, really seemed to make the difference for the team. What was your mindset trying to clean up the glass there in the second half trying to get your team extra possessions? KLINT CARLSON: Yeah, I missed a couple blockouts in the first half. That's what we were talking about the whole game. Coach Jake really put it on us to get all those rebounds, and so in my mind I just wanted to go get every single loose ball and doing that just for my teammates. Q. Wes, can you talk about facing a guy like Fred VanVleet and going back and forth with him during the game? WES WASHPUN: Heck of a player. I can't say enough about Fred. He's Player of the Year in our league this year and he's a really talented kid. To go back and forth and have a chance to compete with a guy like that, you can't even describe what it's like. You really can't. Q. Klint, how much have you grown this year? What kind of process have you gone through from the beginning of the year to the end of the year to play like this in this kind of a situation? KLINT CARLSON: Yeah, I've grown a lot, and I give all the credit to Coach Jake, the rest of the coach staff and all my teammates for instilling that confidence in me. I know every night I can just go out and give it my all and hopefully help the team, but I know they all believe in me. Q. Wes and Jeremy, could you talk about the mood and when you're down 10-0, the conversation and how you flipped it from there? JEREMY MORGAN: Yeah, you know, we've been in that situation before this season already, and when that situation comes around, we really draw closer together. Wes and Bo and Paul do a great job of bringing us back together, telling us one play at a time, we'll make it back, we'll make it up, just stick together and keep moving forward. WES WASHPUN: Yeah, we know that basketball is a game of runs, and they happen to have a big run at the beginning of the game, but we knew if we just stuck together and kept playing our game, playing our defense, that shots will fall eventually and we'll be able to make it back. Q. Klint or Jeremy, during the huddle, before overtime started, you two started to chuckle a little bit and had smiles on your faces. What was said in that huddle? What went on there? JEREMY MORGAN: I don't remember, honestly. KLINT CARLSON: I don't remember, either. (Laughter). Q. Wes, UNI had six turnovers, didn't give up any fast-break points. How much did you talk about that before the game about not letting them get turnovers and get rolling with that kind of thing? WES WASHPUN: Yeah, yeah, they were really aggressive on defense, so taking care of the ball is always big in any game, and we worked really hard on our transition defense and trying hard not to give up transition points. We did a great job of that tonight, as you can see by the stats. Q. Klint, what was your thought on the banker three-pointer there to give your team the lead? KLINT CARLSON: Yeah, I let that go, and I said, oh, shoot, that's real long, and then I was just hoping it would just go long enough that it would go in. But fortunately that shot did go in, but I wouldn't take it if I didn't have that confidence from my teammates. Q. Wes, I think it was you and Matt Bohannon that had Fred trapped in a corner toward the end of regulation. Take us through that play and what you saw. WES WASHPUN: We were just trying to string him out, really, not give him any angles to be able to drive, and Bo ended up getting a hand on the ball, and when we see a loose ball, we all just kind of dove for it, and it's just one of those plays that's kind of a bang-bang thing. For Jeremy to come down and get a good look and take that shot with all the confidence he has, it just happened to go in. Q. Wes, how long do you enjoy this, and then when do you wipe it away to be able to focus on tomorrow? WES WASHPUN: I'd say you enjoy it for a little bit, but we know we have one more left, and we're going to play a talented team tomorrow and teams that we've battled with all year. It's not going to be easy and nobody is going to lay down, so we've got to prepare ourselves for tomorrow. Q. Wes and Jeremy, yesterday Coach Jacobson really talked about guarding VanVleet and Baker with you two. How important was it, they didn't hit their first three until the second half? And what did you do to stop them from shooting effectively from the perimeter? WES WASHPUN: I'd say we just tried to keep them uncomfortable, keep them on their toes, keep them guessing what we were doing defensively, use our length and our quickness to be able to force them into some tougher shots. That's all you can do with guys like that. They're really talented players. So they're going to make a few. They hit a few tough ones. You just have to wipe it off and keep coming at them the next play. JEREMY MORGAN: Yeah, they're both tremendous players. You've just got to go out and work hard as you can, make their shots tough. You know they're going to make some tough ones, but you've got to come back down and try to make it tough again the next one, so that's what we did. Q. Ben, how key was it to get them to switch Fred off of Wes and allow him to penetrate? Because it seemed to be pretty much every possession there the last 10 minutes or so regulation. BEN JACOBSON: Yeah, that was -- early in the game, we really couldn't get settled into anything. It was already halfway through the shot clock before our guys even got into the front court and kind of got organized, so we were really out of sorts in the first half, and I give credit to the way they approached the game. What we did late in the game, we've done some the last month or so, trying to find anyway possible to get Wes in a position where he can get downhill, and sometimes that's with the center, sometimes it's with a guard. So we did both in the second half, and then the last eight minutes in overtime, we were just -- it wasn't going to be Fred, it wasn't going to be Ron, but then I just tried to find which other of the guys was going to be our best match-up for Wes. Q. At any point in the first half you guys down 10-0, did you feel like the game was going to get out of hand? BEN JACOBSON: You know, not really. We came in here last year and got down 18 in the first half in the championship game. You know, we've got enough guys back from that team, so I didn't feel like at that point that it was getting away, it was going to get away from us. What I was thinking about is, how do we get into offense a little bit? That press just had us out of whack a little bit and we weren't able to get moving. Offensively we couldn't get any rhythm. So I was just thinking about how we could get going, just get some rhythm going with our offense, get moving around a little bit. Q. A two-parter for you: Do you ever find yourself in the middle of a game stepping back and appreciating how good the game is? And then with that, how much more satisfying does a win like this become because it's such a good game? BEN JACOBSON: Yeah, you know, I did a little bit today. I don't very often. Maybe just a handful of games. I know I didn't when I was an assistant coach. Maybe just a handful of times in my 10 years as a head coach where I thought, man, this game is -- this is unbelievable. You're lucky to be standing here watching these guys play. I can count them on one hand for sure, and today was one of them, yeah. The last few minutes of regulation and overtime, yeah, I did. It felt like this was really pretty special to be a part of a game like this. And then obviously, yeah, you want your guys to win. We're playing to go to the NCAA Tournament, so you want your guys to have success. You want them to have a shot, 40 minutes to get to the NCAA Tournament. Yeah, when that horn goes off and you win a game like this, you feel awfully good. Q. Grady's 15-foot jumper, is that a hard area for your defense to cover, and how did that change things when he couldn't play very much because of foul trouble? BEN JACOBSON: Yeah, you know, they -- we worked hard not to allow the ball to get back to the middle of the floor with Fred and Ron, to use the ball screen to get to that spot, but when you do that, when you keep it on one side, you've got to put Grady's defender sitting there at 15 feet and his ability to slide and shoot that jumper, that's a hard thing for us to defend. Coming into the game, that's one of the decisions that we had to make; do we allow Fred to get to the middle and have his options, or we know they're going to put Grady at 15 to 17 feet and he's going to be open sometimes; do we let that shot be part of their offense, and we made a decision to let it be part of their offense. Yeah, when he had to come out, that helped us, because they weren't going to put somebody else into that spot. But we knew we were going to give that up and give him credit for making them. Q. Talk about Klint Carlson and what he did for you guys in the second half. He just out-physicaled Wichita State. Talk about the evolution of him as a player. BEN JACOBSON: Yeah, he's played five weeks probably. He's played great. He banged up his knee pretty good at Missouri State, and for a week to 10 days he wasn't able to practice full speed and just couldn't get over that injury. From the time he got over that and started playing just a little bit more and a little bit better, boy, he's played great. We can play him at the power forward and go a little bit bigger or we can move him to the center position and then open up our offense. So he was good offensively in that regard, but today, it really showed up at the other end. He went and got rebounds against a team that's got guys that go and get rebounds. Q. Could you take us to the locker room? Matt Bohannon just suggested it was a senior, maybe the seniors, plural, had a little platform in that locker room at halftime, and then the quick spurt at the start of the second half. BEN JACOBSON: Yeah, I could hear them when I was getting close to the locker room. They were going at it pretty good at halftime, and it was led by Bo and Wes. Yeah, I mean, those guys have been great. They have been unbelievable in terms of their leadership, and they weren't ready to let it go just yet, and you could hear that as I walked in at halftime. And then the adjustments we made ball screen-wise, man, I got unbelievable assistant coaches. I'll tell you what, they come up with the right stuff, and I don't always listen to them, and I don't always give them credit, but they come up with good stuff, and that was a big part of the second half. They came up with the right stuff. Q. They were 2-for-24 from three, and you guys were 6-for-25. So both defenses are extended, and it was really a hard-fought defensive game. I just wonder, is there a trade-off? Do the scores sort of reflect the amount of energy being spent on the defensive side? BEN JACOBSON: Yeah, I would agree that that had some or a lot to do with it. You know, our last game with Wichita was in Wichita, and it was in the 50s, and neither team shot it great in that one. You know, these guys have played against each other for a long time. Wes is in his third year, Bo is in his fourth year, and obviously Fred and Ron are in their fourth year. They've played against each other a lot. There's not a lot of secrets that way. We've got a pretty good idea of what they're going to do as a team, they've got a pretty good idea what we're going to do. They're just -- like I said, there's enough experience on both sides that it's going to be a little bit harder offensively. And then the way that we played, we were going to take away some things for a couple of guys and work hard to do that, which was going to leave a couple guys open, just as long -- we were hopeful it wouldn't be Fred or Ron, so some other guys had some shots, but I think on our side of it we had some open ones, too. Down the stretch in regulation, Bo was wide open and missed it, Jeremy was wide open and missed it, so there was a little bit of that both ways. Q. What impressed you most about your team with that win today? BEN JACOBSON: Man, how much fun they were having the last five, six minutes of regulation and overtime. I have not been involved in a game that is that close and with that much on the line, and guys are like really enjoying it, smiling and talking in a way that allows them to go out and make plays. That was really fun for me today. We've been really fortunate that our program has been in some big games. Some of those guys have been a little bit more tense. We've won a lot of them. Today, man, that last five minutes in overtime, guys were loose, they were saying all the right things. It was really, really fun to be a part of that, and like I said, sometimes in those games, it isn't as much fun, it gets a little tense. But that was probably the thing I was most impressed with today. Q. Do you expect Wichita State to get one of those at-large bids to the NCAA Tournament? BEN JACOBSON: Yeah, I absolutely do. I don't think there's any question that they will get an at-large bid. You know, the tournament when Fred didn't play, those games have to be looked at. My understanding is that the Committee takes that into consideration. And outside of that, they've had the kind of year when Fred has been healthy, they've played like the team that should be in the NCAA Tournament, so I don't think there's any question that they get a bid. 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
|