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BIG TEN CONFERENCE WOMEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIPMarch 8, 2019Tim EatmanStasha CareyArella GuirantesIndianapolis, Indiana Rutgers - 64, Purdue - 49 TIM EATMAN: Any time you get a chance to play in the Big Ten Tournament, you just get excited for being in Indy with all these great competitors and great teams. We're very fortunate that our kids played extremely hard. I thought they played with a lot of toughness and I thought they played with a lot of sense of urgency that we came here to get something done. We're excited about Purdue, the way Purdue played. We knew that they were going to hit the boards extremely hard. I think in the first half they out-rebounded us, but I thought in the second half we dug in and we got to our match-ups and our 55 in. We're just excited about the opportunity tomorrow. Q. Stasha, how hard have these past few weeks been, and how have you worked through that to play as well as you guys have? STASHA CAREY: They've been tough, but every day we come in, we set team standards for ourselves, and we just come in, we remain -- we try and remain focused as much as possible. I know we had a week off, kind of, but we just stayed focused. We continued to practice hard. Q. You pulled within one; talk about the resilience this team has to always punch back. ARELLA GUIRANTES: Coach just says just keep the gas running, basically. Our 55, he just said to never give up on it, never give up on it, never give up on each other. We know teams are never going to give up in March. It's March. The ball and the hoop is wide open in March. We just know that there's going to be runs, and we've just got to fight through. STASHA CAREY: We know that we played them during our regular season, and we came out with that win, so we knew tonight that they were going to come and give it all they had, especially with it being the tournament. And one thing that we just focused on is staying together a lot, so we knew that when they were going to come back and give us all they had that we had to stay calm, collected and together at the end of the day. Q. Just subbing five in at a time, was that just the plan maybe to wear down Purdue playing its third game in three days? TIM EATMAN: Well, it's not to wear down Purdue, it's to maintain our intensity. We want to get into the 55, and so we want to put pressure on the basketball, we want to get to our match-ups and we want a defensive rebound every possession. When I feel like we're not getting to our match-ups it's time to sub because we want to keep fighting and keep pushing. The way we want to play is we want to play hard every possession. It doesn't matter who and what person it is. Everybody has got to give maximum effort. You'll see it again tomorrow, and we're going to continue to do it hopefully throughout the whole tournament. We're happy about it. Any time you're playing Purdue, you remember last year, Tyler Scaife had to hit a fadeaway jump shot to get a victory for us. You never can write Purdue off. They've got great coaches, great kids, and they play hard. Q. In the second half, subbing those five and five and then that full court pressure, just balancing Purdue, just talk about that and how aggressive they were that entire time. TIM EATMAN: Well, we felt like if we could get to our match-ups that we could get a couple traps, and if we could get one to two traps every possession I think we kept fighting hard to get to that 10-second violation. I think with we got one or two in the basketball game. So if we can continue to get into the traps and then make the rotation that we need to make and then guard them for the rest of the 15 to 16 seconds, I think we've got an opportunity to be successful. Purdue runs so much stuff. You see them run three patterns in the same 30-second possession. So we wanted to disrupt it as much as we could and to keep them off balance. That's what we was trying to get accomplished. Q. How big was that Peleg Pelc three to end the half? What was that momentum like for your team? I saw you over there fired up, and including that it was 22-8 the rest of the game in favor of you guys. TIM EATMAN: Well, when Noga is such a great shooter, and because she's a great shooter, we have tremendous confidence in her. She's a good kid. She works extremely hard for us every day, day in and day out. We was happy for her because of the fact that she made one, and so hopefully tomorrow she'll get an opportunity to make some more. But the three that she hit was huge. The three that Charise hit was huge. I thought every time they made a run at us, we had someone step up and make a play, and it wasn't the same person every time. Q. How do you game plan for a player like Megan Gustafson tomorrow? TIM EATMAN: Well, first of all, we've got to give credit where credit is due. She's the Big Ten Player of the Year for a reason. She's a kid that plays extremely hard every possession, and they can depend on her, and that's one of the things that she's reliable and they look for her all the time. We've got to do a better job in this game not really guarding Megan but getting back in transition defense. The last time we played them they got like 14 to 16 points in transition. So we've got to do a better job playing transition defense, and then we've got to do a better job sitting on her and making sure she doesn't get easy looks. But she's going to get hers. We've just got to make her work to get everything she gets tomorrow. Q. You were switching five in, five out, you said you did that not to really stop Purdue but to keep your intensity. Towards the end of the game you started to go away from that. Was there any reason you stopped doing that? TIM EATMAN: Well, I thought down the stretch we needed to execute, and we was trying to run more clock. Normally when we're subbing five in and five out -- we're coming down one or two or three passes and we're taking a shot, then I thought when we had like a 10-plus lead that we needed to get within the shot clock and not take shots within eight seconds. I felt the group that was out there was working, running their cuts hard, and because they was running their cuts hard I felt like we could just stick with them and we could make plays. Q. Last time out in Iowa City playing the Hawkeyes, Hannah Stewart, Makenzie Meyer kind of gave your guards a little bit of trouble. How are you looking at that match-up for tomorrow? TIM EATMAN: Well, we're going to start working on it in about 10 minutes from now, and in about 10 minutes we're going to go back and watch personnel. We're going to talk about how they got into the lanes and we didn't stunt the wings very hard when we played them the last time. We got flat and we gave them the elbow drive too much. They got into the lane, into the gut of our defense too much. Hopefully tomorrow we're going to get some better close-outs, and we're going to get -- again, it started from transition defense. We were on our heels the entire night. We've got to fight back and not be on our heels, and when we're not on our heels we can have a better opportunity to defend on the perimeter. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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