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BIG EAST CONFERENCE MEN'S BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT

March 9, 2017

Ed Cooley

New York, New York

Creighton - 70, Providence - 58

COACH COOLEY: Well, that was a masterpiece there. We just didn't play well. I give Creighton a lot of credit. That was, pick who played worse in that game. That probably wasn't one of Mac's (Doug McDermott) better games as a team.

26 points on turnovers, uncharacteristic turnovers for us. I thought we were lackadaisical. Just we didn't play well. We picked a bad time to play our worst game in probably five or six weeks.

If you would have told me that they would be 4-for-20 and miss those free throws and have seven assists I'd like to say we have a chance to win the game.

Again, give them credit; they advance. In tournament play you can't play poorly and expect to win. So hopefully we have another game left in us in the NCAA Tournament. I think we've done some good things as of late. We just picked a bad time to play poor. Proud of our kids, very, very proud of our team finishing the regular season well.

Unfortunately, we didn't play well in our tournament here in Madison Square Garden. But our league shows how tough it is night in night out and hopefully we get invited to this party on Sunday.

Q. Talking about uncharacteristic turnovers, is it just sloppy, mental mistakes?
COACH COOLEY: I think a lot of them were mental mistakes, they really were. For whatever reason, guys, it happens. You get games that -- normally games like that in November and December. But come March you've got to try to play as clean as you can and we just didn't play clean.

I thought we played tough. I thought we were really, really tough we just didn't execute at all. It was really poor.

Q. Your team shot almost 50 percent from the line tonight, how concerning is that?
COACH COOLEY: It's been -- we've been struggling all year from the line. I don't have an answer for that. We practice it as much as we can. Hopefully if we have another game, hopefully we shoot 90 percent. It happens sometimes.

Q. The team's putting a lot of pressure on themselves defensively when they're missing shots. Do you think that's also the effort they're expending on defense is affecting the free-throw shooting?
COACH COOLEY: No, I mean, come on, these kids are 18 to 22 years old. As my pop says, they should be able to touch the sky two out of three times. They're young, energetic. No, it's what you play for.

Who cannot play in this building and be excited you know what I mean? That's what you're playing for. You want to get stops, which we did. We got some unbelievable stops but we gave it right back to them on six different occasions. We took the ball, we got the stop and threw it right away to them. So I don't think it was us focusing on defense, it's just we played bad.

Q. Quick perspective, you were 4-8, you would have taken this 10-9 conference in the end. Is this a game you throw away the tape, say, hey, guys we're on a roll, hopefully looking forward to things next weekend?
COACH COOLEY: I think your question is great. We definitely don't need to see this. I saw it once. Right now -- what I just talked to the team about is anytime you have a chance to control your own destiny, not just in basketball, in life, when you have a chance to control what you want to do and you don't take advantage of it, don't complain. We had an opportunity to cement ourselves clearly and we didn't take advantage of that.

It's a great learning point for my kids. It's a great learning point for me as a coach and hopefully if we get invited to that dance there's some carry-over from this poor performance today.

This loss is on me. Not those players. It's a players game. The coach did a bad job today. But the players, they deserve more credit.

THE MODERATOR: Thank you.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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