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MAUI JIM MAUI INVITATIONALNovember 19, 2018Bruce PearlJared HarperBryce BrownLahaina, Maui, Hawaii Auburn - 88 Xavier - 79 MEGAN GODFREY: Coach, start with an opening statement. BRUCE PEARL: Great win for our program. Xavier is very talented, Travis is one of the bright young coaches in this country, runs brilliant stuff offensively. My guys will tell you, they're good. We rely on each other. It's as simple as that. We won the game because in the over time period in deep foul trouble we had some guys step up and make plays. But we don't even get in that situation without these two guys without Jared and Bryce. They're terrific back court players, you can see the difference that experience makes. You just can't be afraid to fail. You just got to go out there and put it on the line. I thought these guys both did that, they both competed and the difference obviously was their outstanding play. MEGAN GODFREY: Thank you coach. Questions, please. Q. When you have a guy like Jared playing that way in that situation, how much of that is coaching and how much of that is you just letting them kind of do what he can do? BRUCE PEARL: I'll answer that one, but the next one is all players. Coaches get way too much credit when things go well, maybe a little too much when they don't go well. These guys are self-made players now. These guys are in the gym all the time. They're in the gym with my assistant coaches and with their dads and their families. And they just have paid the price. They came to Auburn to train, they came to Auburn to make history, they came to Auburn when Auburn wasn't very good. It's all about the players. It's all about them, not about the coaching. Q. Obviously we don't know the outcome of this game that's happening right now, but how much have you thought about the potential of playing a team like Duke tomorrow in this tournament? JARED HARPER: I kind of lost my voice a little bit but I would just say that we're just taking it one game at a time. We just knew if we want to play schools like Duke and Gonzaga and Arizona, everybody else on the other side, we had to win the first one. So we took control of the first one, we were able to win the first one and just ready to play tomorrow. BRYCE BROWN: Same thing. Coach preaches take one game at a time in this tournament here. Every team is talented. You got to win the first one to get to the next one. Of course Duke is a target for us, we're looking forward to that, hopefully, depending upon how this matchup goes today. Q. How ready are you guys for three straight games like this? That was a signature Maui invitational type of battle. BRYCE BROWN: I feel like we're more ready than anybody to be honest with you. We have an extremely deep team so I feel like with guards and the bigs we have a lot of depth, so me and Jared played heavy minutes today we're going to depend on our other guards and other bigs to step in and probably play a few more minutes tomorrow just to help with that fatigue that we took today. That's what I like about this team, just the depth. So I feel like we're more prepared than anybody with the experience and the players we have. JARED HARPER: I want to say like during this off season and during our first couple weeks of the season we just been, coach has been preparing us for just playing three days in a row. If you win, lose or whatever you're going to play three straight games, so we got to prepare our bodies for that. Q. For both of you, you guys studied Xavier obviously leading up to this game. Was there anything in this contest that surprised you based on what you had seen on film of them? BRYCE BROWN: I would say yes. I didn't feel like they could shoot the ball that well, they shot pretty good, had to extend our defense a little more. The guards are really good, had a few different actions that we didn't go over. But we had to just adjust and stick to our principles, so I feel like we did pretty good though. BRUCE PEARL: We didn't go over them enough. (Laughter.) Q. You guys both had a couple of big dunks. With that dunk late everybody's talking about Jared. BRYCE BROWN: I tried to come back at Jared with a Top-10 one but it's hard to top one like that. That was crazy. Q. What impact does that have on a team when he makes those explosive plays? BRYCE BROWN: Game over. Game over. I already knew it was over after that. Jared, he's a phenomenal player, I really enjoy playing with him this pass few years. So when he makes plays like that it just gives the whole team confidence knowing on both ends of the court. Q. If it is Duke tomorrow, how much better do you guys have to play and in what areas do you have to improve? JARED HARPER: We just know that if we can defend and rebound we can play with any team in the country, so I know that's going to be a focus for us. We didn't rebound the ball today like we wanted to or how we expected. So I know we're going to go back and look at just check it out and just, if we're able to defend and rebound, like I said, we're going to be in good shape. MEGAN GODFREY: All right. Take questions for coach, please. Q. I think a lot of people expected certain players on that team to do well, but six, seven guys are doing things that maybe you didn't anticipate. Do you think that was sort of a wake up call early, the early success they had and how many guys were stepping up for them? BRUCE PEARL: For Xavier? Q. For you guys and adjusting to that. How many of their guys were doing so much early on. BRUCE PEARL: Depth is a strength of ours. And yet we got, our bench got outscored 31-16. So I'm glad the kids gave the bench credit, we rely on the bench, we need more from the bench. There was some guys that come off the bench that can't be afraid to make plays. When you play teams like this you're not going to get stops unless you make plays, they're just not going to miss shots or not going to go an escrow the offensive glass. Now to our credit we turned them over 22 times. An area that Bryce Brown does not get enough credit for is his defense. Goodin's a terrific player, he shot 3-19 and he had seven turnovers. I give Bryce Brown a lot of credit for that. Goodin's a heck of a good player. That was a big factor in us being able to win the game. You see their offense, a lot of times it was their defensive plays. The kids are right, we got to do a better job of rebounding all across the board. Because way too many second chance points for Xavier. But that's one of the things they do really well. Q. They shot pretty well in the second half, and then you the team locked in in overtime. What did you say to them? A lot of times you have to get a team to regroup, what did you say to them to get them refocused in overtime because they locked in defensively. BRUCE PEARL: I thought both teams early, remember the first several possessions nobody could score and I thought both teams did a good job defensively. You have to think at some point that fatigue had to be a factor late in that game. We made a couple shots, got a couple of rebounds, we didn't give them the offensive rebounds that they had early, stopped fouling them quite so much. They went to the foul line a little bit and so I just think it was just we sucked it up and I give our coaches and our trainers credit for our conditioning. Q. The SEC championship last year, but maybe not a lot of the popularity that might come from that for most people. Just your team still have sort of a chip even though you won a championship of maybe not getting the recognition that maybe it deserves? BRUCE PEARL: Well I think we feel like we have unfinished business and the reason why, at the end of the year we were down to seven scholarship maybe eight scholarship guys. We were hurt. We limped into the tournament, had a heroic win against Charleston and got blown out by Clemson. We didn't have Austin Wiley. Samir Doughty was sitting out. And so I think all those, all those factors -- and you got to remember there's not a McDonald's All-American on that team, only two five stars in Wiley and Okeke and the rest of those guys are threes and fours and got chips on their shoulders and feel like they got overlooked. So you have an opportunity to come to Maui, again I give Dave Odom credit for trusting me, having been a colleague of mine in the SEC, I mean he took a real chance inviting Auburn into this field because number one if we weren't competitive it would not look good, and number two Auburn doesn't travel in basketball we travel in football and yet we had a great turnout -- I think the combination of Maui and our team playing well and the real honor that we feel about representing the SEC and being in this amazing tournament, so I'm proud of Auburn for representing this morning. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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