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NCAA WOMEN'S REGIONAL SEMIFINALS AND FINALS: LEXINGTONMarch 23, 2018Kim MulkeyKalani BrownAlexis MorrisDekeiya CohenLexington, Kentucky Oregon State - 72, Baylor - 67 Q. You came in on such a roll. Your statistics for the last couple of games were outstanding. What went wrong tonight that you didn't do particularly well that you had been doing maybe all season long? KIM MULKEY: Hey, can you get the athletes first like she said and save that question and then I can elaborate a little more? Save it for me, okay? Q. Y'all had come in on such a roll. Your statistics the last couple of games were outstanding, and tonight it seemed like you could never really get into a rhythm, get anything going that you normally do. KALANI BROWN: I think it starts with myself not being able to score the ball. I let my team down tonight, honestly. DEKEIYA COHEN: I just think that, like you said, certain things weren't falling for us tonight that we usually get, and we try to make adjustments, but it wasn't working, so I think we suffered the consequence. Q. Ms. Brown, I'm sure you've seen all kinds of defenses this year. You went out to the top of the key and hit some in the first half. Did they change anything against you to make you change your game? KALANI BROWN: No, there was nothing we hadn't really seen before, I just couldn't finish my shots. And at the top of the key, she started denying me that shot after I had hit a few, so I had to rearrange some things, and I was just out of rhythm tonight. DEKEIYA COHEN: I was just playing within the flow of the offense, and if things came my way, then I shot it, and some shots fell, some shots didn't. We didn't try to force anything that we don't usually do. Q. For Alexis, you guys did such a good job defensively in that second quarter, held them to nine points. Did they do anything to change, or what did y'all maybe not do in the second half that you did really well in that second quarter? ALEXIS MORRIS: I think our defense was good in the second half. I think we got stops. It wasn't nothing they did, it was us. We wasn't Baylor tonight. We're going to watch film, get in the film room, and we'll get it right. Q. Kalani, you mentioned last week after the early part against Michigan that you couldn't afford to play like that again in a game the rest of the way. Did something not click again tonight? Did you feel kind of the way you did after the first half against Michigan when things went wrong? KALANI BROWN: Not really. She was able to finish and I couldn't. That was the end of it. Q. Only senior up here, realizing this is your last game, how tough was this and how tough is it to go out this way? DEKEIYA COHEN: Very tough. It's not like expected, obviously, but I think we fought hard. I think we fought until the end, and that's all I could really ask for. I know that we all wanted it the same way I want it, even though I was a senior, but we fell a little short. But I'm proud of our overall season. Q. Kim, I think they finished 9 of 20 from three. You knew that coming in. Did you feel like overall, though, y'all did a pretty good job on defending the three? KIM MULKEY: No, I don't. I think their offense exposes you a lot, particularly when you're a man-to-man team, and that's what you've played. But then you think, I can't go to a zone with as many perimeter shooters as they have. I thought their big girl, that kid, she has to be older than a senior because she played like she was older. I mean, she was dominant. We had nobody that could guard her. She just reminded me of my days back in international basketball, where she just dominated the floor, shooting, rebounding, finding open players. She was by far the best player on the floor tonight, and she controlled the whole thing for her team. I should call her name, right, Gülich? Heck, just a great player. Q. Talk about things that you would like to do that you didn't do well -- KIM MULKEY: Well, look, they're good. We're good. The next two teams are good. When you get to this level, it's just the nature of the business. Whoever hits shots, makes shots, executes, you know, does what you have to do to win is going to win. We couldn't score the basketball. How many lay-ups did Kalani miss? How many lay-ups did -- executing against their zone. We got the looks we wanted for Cox. It's partly what we just missed, but give your opponent credit. I believe in giving your opponent credit. Guys, we milked that tournament about as far as we could milk it. Y'all know what that means in Oregon? With all the stuff we had this year happen to this basketball team, I can't go in there and chew them out. We lost to a very good team, a team that shot it extremely well, and we seem to bring out the best in people, and that's respect for our program, as well. We lost one kid. We signed the No. 1 recruiting class in the country. They'll be on campus this summer, and we will go back to work. Q. I think it was early in the game, Alexis had missed two or three lay-ups, seemed to be going too fast. Was that the case with her, almost like she was going too fast? KIM MULKEY: You know, I'm not one to make excuses. They're a young team, we're a young team. We lost two starters in the last four weeks. It matters. It matters. Alexis Morris stepped in and did a remarkable job as a freshman. Juicy Landrum stepped in and did a remarkable job as a sophomore. I thought there were moments tonight where the lights were too big. To have to look at Juicy, did Juicy even score tonight? She played almost half the game and didn't even score. I'll have to go back and look and see why. Were you nervous? You know, sometimes kids -- the lights are bright, the deeper you make a run in the tournament. I don't know. But I know we wouldn't be here today without her stepping in and doing good when Natalie went down. Morris is a freshman, and she will learn. She will get better. The good thing is we have them all back. Did we miss Kristy Wallace? Guys, you don't miss -- look, you lose your quarterback, yeah, you miss them. We missed her tonight. But that doesn't mean that we couldn't have won the game. That doesn't mean we went in there thinking we were defeated. We fought to the very end. It was a two-point game, and you make a defensive stop, we made a mistake on coming to help when I didn't think we needed to help, and that was a sophomore that made that decision, too. So they'll learn from it. We'll get better. Q. 33 wins, and with everything that this team went through, was this the most impressive way a team could get to 30-plus wins? KIM MULKEY: Hmm. Well, it wasn't easy. That's for sure. It seems like from the beginning of the season until just, what, two, three weeks ago when we lost Kristy, it never stopped. You keep thinking you're going to get a break, and something is going to make all the stuff stop, and it never did. It was just one thing after another. It started in November with the death of my grandchild. Then it was Trinity Oliver tore her knee up. We only had 10 to begin with. Trinity Oliver tore her knee up. Then we're stranded on the side of a highway with fog and bus on fire, 3:00 in the morning. Then we come back and Chameka dies. It was just something that we had to deal with, and you have to deal with it. You're human. I'm so proud of how they dealt with it because they really made coming to work enjoyable. And then you had Cox with the ketoacidosis, didn't even play in the UCLA game. She's trying not to go into a coma because of her diabetes, then we find out her sister has diabetes, we have to deal with that. Then we have two families going through marital issues. It's stuff -- I don't have a book to go find what page I find how to deal with this on. You deal with it with your heart. You deal with it as you would your own family and as a mother and as their coach, and yet we don't get a break. You've just got to keep going to work. And you don't go to work with this stoic face like, oh, be strong, be brave. You cry with them, you laugh with them, you bring it out of them, and it's a testament, and I've said this many times, to the parenting of these kids, because they do care, they do hurt, they do have feelings. But they just kept playing. They won a Big 12 championship. They ran the table in the Big 12. They won the Big 12 tournament. They got a 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament. You know, there's a lot to be proud of. But probably the biggest thing that I'm going to take away from today is the experience that a lot of young people got. I looked out there on that floor one time, and I didn't have a senior on the floor. I had two freshmen, three sophomores on the floor at one time. And the value of their playing time tonight and throughout the year will make us a better team next year and the year after. Q. Is it almost to a point with all of what you said that you have set a standard that not many people have reached in women's basketball that when you keep knocking on the door and are falling just short that it could become something that you want too much and players feel that when they get here? KIM MULKEY: No. No, who wants to go play somewhere that doesn't have a standard? I don't. That's called mediocrity. Name me another program right now that has that standard around central Texas. Men, women, football, name them. I'm proud of that standard. I don't like finishing in the Sweet 16 or in the Elite 8, but as I tell you many times, we're going to keep feeding that monster. If we break through that door, we'll break through it. If we don't, we'll just keep feeding it. Does that help a little bit? Q. You talked about Gülich earlier. How did you want to guard her? What were you trying to take away from her? KIM MULKEY: Well, she's hard to double because she faces up. She gets away from the basket. So she is one of those that's not just a back-to-the-basket post player. She sets those picks for the guards, but it's not like she's rolling to that block where you can double her a lot. She got some on-the-block stuff one-on-one, but they run a system where you have to respect the shooters on the other side of the floor, so you don't know how much do I really help off. I just thought the kid shot lights out. I mean, guys, they shot 60 and 45 percent in the second half. You know, that's what seniors do. She was the best player on the floor, and she carried her team basically. She really did. She carried them in that she made everybody else better. She gave them good looks, good shots, one more rebound. I was very impressed with her. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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