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COUNTDOWN CLASSIC: INDIANA VS LOUISVILLE

December 31, 2016

Rick Pitino

Indianapolis, Indiana

Louisville - 77, Indiana - 62

RICK PITINO: When you get ready to play Indiana, it puts a lot of stress on a staff because when you look at their shooting percentages and you understand how well they shoot the ball, you can understand that you're going to give up some drives once in a while, but you can't let them shoot the ball like they've been shooting it, and they've played great against great teams, obviously Kansas and North Carolina.

But our defense was great tonight. We had 40 deflections in the game, and Anas Mahmoud had 10 by himself. So we really are proud of this victory, but most important, you have no idea the stress Indiana can put on a team with the way they pin drive, pass, and do the things they're capable of doing, but our guys really were great at the defensive end tonight, and they were not only highly, highly intelligent but they did a lot of great things, as well, on offense. They passed the ball extremely well.

Q. After the Virginia game, Donovan said that you've noticed that they weren't hustling as much as you would have liked --
RICK PITINO: It's not hustling. I think both in Old Dominion and Virginia, when they get in a very slow, deliberate style, and that is energized, and I said, look, you could play one of those teams in the tournament. Because we practice a certain way, pressing and running, now that's no reason to make an excuse about Virginia. Virginia was the better team that night. They played better. Our goal in the Virginia game was to play as well at the defensive end as they did because you never know what's going to happen on offense.

But tonight, just like the Kentucky game, we were great on defense, we did a lot of terrific things on offense, and just got a big lift from Donovan, Deng, and especially Anas.

Q. Inserting Anas into the starting lineup, what did you hope to get out of that, and how much did that kind of --
RICK PITINO: Yeah, I would say 10 deflections -- look, I like to change things when you lose, get people out of their comfort zone, and I had a talk with Donovan Mitchell, and I said, look, son, I never thought I would take you out of the starting lineup. You know starting doesn't mean anything, but I just saw who wants to play like a star, and that means he's not counting his misses, he's someone that'll shoot every open shot, create, and not worry about what the outside world thinks of his game. I said, so you need to have a talk with somebody besides me, and I told him the person he should talk to, and you should just understand I think you're a star except you don't think you're a star, so I'm going to bring you off the bench. You're still going to play a lot, but I need guys that want to be stars and take shots and they don't count the misses. I told Deng, you're next. You're the next one going to the bench if you don't start taking shots.

Because we're wide open and we don't shoot the ball, and they both got rewarded, both got rewarded in a big way.

Q. (No microphone.)
RICK PITINO: No, it was a personal thing between the two of us. If he does talk to that guy, we're very lucky.

Q. You mentioned you wanted to kind of take away their threes, take away their ability to shoot, but you also made it really difficult for Thomas Bryant inside. Was that a key for your bigs?
RICK PITINO: Well, Anas, Ray and Jaylen are very long, and while some people come off the perimeter people, and we didn't, we gambled on our length, and most of the time we gave them some lay-ups at the end of the game, but when you're playing guys a lot of minutes and they're denying and taking it away, you're going to give up some lay-ups, and we didn't come off to block the shot for the dump-down, and they made free throws. We passed the ball beautifully in the first half offensively. Just beautifully. Executed great.

Q. Back to Donovan, I think he had four lay-ups. You're talking about him playing like a star. Do you want to see him drive the ball more like that?
RICK PITINO: I want you to just play with no fear of missing, and if he's 0 for 7, I want him to go 0 for 10. I just want no -- I tell these guys, my coach in college -- I played for a brilliant guy, rest his soul today. He was just great, taught me so much about defense. But my responsibility as a point guard was throw it to the corner and watch the other guy shoot. And my job was to never turn it over, try to get five to seven assists, and if I shoot it, I'm coming out of the game. So I developed an offensive style where you had the green light, total green light, because your frustration sometimes as a player, and back then we had a couple unknown guys like Julius Erving, so it was probably a good coaching move not going to me, but that being said, I wanted to be the opposite as a coach, and our guys would just hold them -- they had an uncontested three, they would pass it up like Donovan did one time, ball fake, go in the lane, take a challenged shot. And the only way really to become a good shooting team is to get the fruits of all the labor you put in, and tonight we did, we shot almost 53 percent, held them to 32 percent, didn't turn the ball over, got 40 deflections. I mean, you can't play any better than this, and we played a great game against Kentucky, as well.

Q. If you could just talk about the help and recover on the defensive end. Seemed like the communication was about as good as it's been all year, and to hold Indiana to 19 percent on three-point shots, kind of talk about that.
RICK PITINO: Well, it wasn't help and recover, it was more stay at home. They'll do two things. They'll cut back door, they'll cut when they throw it inside, and we said, we've got post players who have length. Let them guard it. You stay on the shooter. Now, you can be off on the weak side, but you're going to get to it, and then we switched out the entire game and allowed our seven-footers to defend their guards. We didn't get hurt but once or twice in the game.

Q. With Jaylen, is that kind of what you want to get from him?
RICK PITINO: I thought the whole team played great. I can't -- I thought Donovan was -- when I went to the box and one, and I didn't want to call time-out there, I said, why are we going to -- I said, I wanted him to be a star, but now we've got ignore the star and we've got to start moving the box and one which is very easy to play against. I said, let's get the other guys moving in the game. Let them try to play 4 on 4 with us. But I think it's a good compliment and it will get his confidence going to play a box and one.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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