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BIG EAST CONFERENCE MEN'S BASKETBALL TOURNAMENTMarch 10, 2016Chris HoltmannKellen DunhamNew York, New York Butler - 60, Providence - 74 CHRIS HOLTMANN: Give Providence credit. I thought they played well. They have a couple of difficult match-ups for us. And those difficult match-ups we certainly struggle with. Ben being the top of the list there. So give them credit. I think they played well. We have certainly been playing really well here, finishing 7-2. We did not play well today. Providence certainly had something to do with that. I think we contributed to that. We played out of character at times. But give Providence credit for the win. Q. Do you still think this affects your tournament status? CHRIS HOLTMANN: No, I don't follow it closely enough, honestly. From what people have told me the last couple of days, I don't know how it impacts us. Does it change our seed one or two lines, whatever our seed line is? I really won't look at it until we get probably the next couple of days. Q. Did it feel good coming out of halftime to be able to kind of things were going your way to stay in the game? CHRIS HOLTMANN: I think we closed the half well. I don't know that I ever felt like we necessarily had the momentum. I think we closed the half well. But listen, we just -- we couldn't get the stops when we needed to get the stops. We just couldn't. And we had no answer for Bentil. We had zero answer. We threw the house at him a few times. We tried to play zone. We had no answer for him. He was outstanding. Q. Coach, earlier this year against Purdue, tremendous ballgame. Defensively you were using a guard like Tyler Lewis down low that was stripping the ball. Two 7-footers that were really, really tough. I was waiting to see if something along those lines -- obviously Bentil was very difficult to match up against. He was very quick and can shoot from anywhere. At the same time, length has always been for Butler, as far back as I can remember, has been the biggest challenge. Length. CHRIS HOLTMANN: Length. They're long. They've got good positional size. They're a good rebounding team. They're long at almost every position. They lost a seven-foot guy. But by no means are they a small team now. When you have Kris Dunn with that length at the point guard and they are long in other spots. Bentil is a five-man that plays almost like a three-man. He just -- we just had no answer. He's very different than those Purdue bigs. Very different. Almost in every way. Q. Chris, what was the game plan coming in to defend Ben and what did he do different that you weren't ready for? CHRIS HOLTMANN: You know, I think he and Kris are match-up issues for us. So we were trying to double him and trap him. We weren't early enough on some of our traps. But he scored through our traps some, too. And when he's shooting it, he got a couple of threes in the zone, but a lot of them were in our man. So we were trying to bring another guy to him on his bounce, and sometimes we were there. Other times he caught it deep enough and scored over our guys. So listen, he's a good player. He's going to play in the NBA. They are going to have two guys here that are going to play in the NBA hopefully soon. Q. Speaking of those two guys, Bentil-Dunn combination, is that just a different beast? Do you see anything like that with another team? CHRIS HOLTMANN: We have multiple lottery picks in our league. So Henry Ellenson is pretty good. Q. But I mean together. CHRIS HOLTMANN: No, right, they are two First-Team All League guys. I don't know if it was unanimous or not with both of them. They clearly they've earned that -- they've earned that First-Team All League. No one has the combination in our league that they have. Q. Kellen, what does it mean to you, Coach Cooley was saying, I don't ever want to play Dunham again. He plays the game the right way. What does it mean when the opposing coach has such a high regard for the way you play basketball? KELLEN DUNHAM: It's an honor to play in this league. I take it as a compliment when coaches say that to me and my teammates. Q. Kellen, Butler started the second half really well, and then everything just started to get away from them. Can you pinpoint what the difference was? Providence offense was restrained a bit. KELLEN DUNHAM: We got a steady dose of Ben scoring on all cylinders. Once he actually misses a shot, you have to secure the rebound. That's one thing we didn't do well. We didn't take away their tendencies very well. It ended up in a bad result. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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