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BIG TEN CONFERENCE MEN'S BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT

March 14, 2019

Mark Turgeon

Chicago

Nebraska - 69, Maryland - 61

MARK TURGEON: You know, we weren't very good today. I'll just be real with you. And Nebraska, I thought, was terrific, especially when they needed to be, shot clock going down, made a lot of shots. You know, we just never had it. Made mistakes defensively throughout the game. We let our offense affect our defense. We couldn't make a shot, couldn't handle the double-team. So there's a lot of things we didn't do very well today. Because our offense was so bad -- I've already said this, it affected our defense at some critical stages. But we never quit. We tried. We had a couple opportunities late, cut it to five, I think, but they just made big plays. Give them credit. They deserved to win. They were much better than we were today.

Q. Did you feel like you guys had a chance to win when Bruno was not scoring?
MARK TURGEON: No, it's not that Bruno wasn't scoring. They doubled him every time. It was that we didn't make them pay for what they were doing, and that was a disappointing thing. I'm not going to get into why that was happening, but that's disappointing, and Bruno usually is good for a couple of offensive rebound put-backs, and he couldn't get them today. The ball didn't bounce our way a lot, either. Even when I thought we still had a chance, the one bounced on the rim three times, and then they got the offensive rebound. One of those days, but we've got to be able to overcome it. But we had a lot of guys, a lot of coaches, a lot of people that didn't do well today. That's why we lost.

Q. The technical when you were down nine --
MARK TURGEON: I think it was down seven. It was nine, yeah, that's right.

Q. What had led to sort of -- I know it wasn't a one-time outburst. There was a lot going on through the game.
MARK TURGEON: Yeah, I just got on the floor too much. Shouldn't have done it. I thought Darryl got fouled, but they didn't. That's really what matters. Shouldn't have got the technical.

Q. You have a real inexperienced team, a lot of guys this is their first postseason stint. Do you think some guys learned some things about the difference between the regular season today?
MARK TURGEON: Oh, I don't know. People make a lot out of that. What are we, fourth-youngest? We were fifth. I don't know how we got to fourth. We're the fourth-youngest team, and we played like it today. I don't know if it was the building, we didn't know who we were playing. We seemed locked in. When we found out it was Nebraska we had a good walk-through last night, good film session. I felt we were prepared, we just didn't play well.

We have to learn from this. Last year we were sitting here, we lost a game to Wisconsin in New York, and we were praying to get into the NIT, okay. We're in the NCAA Tournament. It's been a heck of a year for us. We've got the fourth youngest team. We played, I heard, the eighth-toughest schedule. We've overcome a lot. We'll overcome this. We just didn't play well today. We'll get ourselves ready to go and hopefully play better in the NCAA Tournament.

Q. Going off that, what can you do in the next couple days, in the next week, to get your team ready to make sure that this doesn't destroy their confidence?
MARK TURGEON: Well, we've bounced back all year in a lot of situations. So I plan for us to do the same thing. We're going to have extra practices now, obviously, that we didn't want. I think the game experience probably would have been a little better for us than practices. We practiced well this week. That's the thing that's tough for me right now sitting in front of you. We really practiced well this week. So we've got to get our minds right moving forward. We'll do a lot of things that way and get back to some of the things that we were doing with them, and hopefully it'll carry over and we'll play well. But we'll be excited. We're going to be real excited when our name pops up. Whoever it is is going to be a really good team, and we're going to have to play better than we did today to have a chance to win.

Q. They matched you in rebounding today statistically. What went wrong and they were doubling Bruno a lot and that leads to Jalen getting offensive boards normally.
MARK TURGEON: Yeah, not today. I wish I had an answer for you on that. But it just wasn't -- we weren't in it. We weren't in it today, we just didn't play well. I can't explain it. I'm disappointed. Players are disappointed. But we just did not have it, couldn't get it going, and if we did for a minute or two, we couldn't sustain it. You know, Emily asked me a question about Bruno's three points. Normally he gets some offensive rebounds. He had zero today. He's a tough box-out. So there's a lot of things that just didn't go our way. We didn't play well. And I think Nebraska deserved to win. I thought they played well. I thought they were into it. I thought their two best players made plays when they had to, and they deserved to win. Happy for Tim.

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