NCAA MEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP: FIRST FOUR

March 14, 2022

Jeff Linder

Hunter Maldonado

Drake Jeffries

Graham Ike

UD Arena

Wyoming Cowboys

Media Conference

THE MODERATOR: We're joined by Wyoming's Graham Ike, Drake Jeffries, Hunter Maldonado and then coach Jeff Linder.

Q. Hunter, I've seen you described a whole bunch of ways, point guard, point forward. Some people have just said basketball player. How do you describe yourself? What do you see you're really good at what and what is your position or positions, plural?

HUNTER MALDONADO: I think I do whatever the team needs. And I see myself, as you said before, as just a basketball player. I go out there. I handle the ball. I get it to the guys that need to get the ball, if they're hot. Whether Drake's hit a couple of shots or Graham's going to work in the post. And I just kind of facilitate and make sure I'm the leader of this team.

Q. You're an at-large bid in the tournament, sneaking in. What have the last few days been like? Selection Sunday was a few days ago. Now you're here in the play-in game. What's it been like the last few days?

DRAKE JEFFRIES: The last few have been a whirlwind, honestly. We were on the bubble as everyone knew. We were just praying for the best. And when we saw our name get called, it was super exciting. The place was electric. We had a blast that day, yesterday. And it's just been so much fun the past 24 hours getting to live out a dream.

GRAHAM IKE: It's just like a moment we've been waiting for, like, for our whole lives as a kid dreaming about playing on this stage, playing in the Big Dance. When we heard our name called, it was super exciting. Couldn't wait to be here.

HUNTER MALDONADO: Adding on to both of those, like they said, it's been a very quick turnaround. Obviously yesterday we found out we were coming. Had to fly out here today and come in, get ready for the game tomorrow. But super excited, and like Graham said it's a dream for sure.

Q. Hunter, I know you talked about I think your sort of play style before I got in here, but Xavier Johnson is their point guard, plays a really fast style. It seems like yours is very slow, deliberate, very controlling, I guess. How do you expect that matchup to go? What have you learned about Johnson so far watching film on him, and how do you expect to sort of contrast your styles to go?

HUNTER MALDONADO: I think it's something we've kind of seen in our conference with teams pushing the pace and then having some three or four teams that do slow it down. So it's not the first time we've seen it. Just be a team effort and try to play to our style and stick to our habits.

Q. Graham, I'm curious, your thoughts watching film with Trayce Jackson-Davis. How do you feel you match up with him? When you look at him what do you see; is there a player you compare him to? Or give me your descriptions what stands out.

GRAHAM IKE: He's a great player. Left-handed player like myself. I see him, how he likes to play in the post. I think it's a great matchup. I'm definitely looking forward to a great player of his caliber, you always dream of playing people like that at this level. I'm just really looking forward to it. I don't really compare him to any player, just try to watch the film and study him.

Q. What are your expectations going into this first game of the tournament?

DRAKE JEFFRIES: We'll go out there and play our hardest for sure. We're going to watch film, like Graham said, lock in and just we pride ourselves on defense. We'll try to sit down and try to get stops and do what we do, not do too much. Obviously it's the Big Dance, big stage, I think we'll just do what we do at our best.

Q. Want to ask you guys about Coach Wicks. He brings a lot of energy, brings the juice. Just want to ask you guys, what does he mean to you, how has he helped you guys?

GRAHAM IKE: I love Coach Wicks to death. As you said he's the energy guy, we call him the juice man because he's always bringing that juice and he's making sure we're dialed in. He's been a great coach the past two years I've been here. He's done nothing but help me get better. I'm really grateful for that.

DRAKE JEFFRIES: Like Graham said, I love Coach Wicks to death. He's one heck of a person. Makes sure we're locked in all day every day. If we're not on our Ps and Qs he'll get on us. And he's got a bit of stuff to him. He's the real one out there. He's a real dude and will really hold you accountable.

HUNTER MALDONADO: I think more than these two guys here, Wicks is our guard coach so I get to spend a lot of time with him breaking down the film, doing individual (indiscernible). He's a great guy, great coach. As they said brings the juice every day without fail. And he's a great guy you can rely on.

Q. Going back to Hunter's answer and involve all of you guys. What allows you guys to control pace when you want to? When a team wants to speed you up, go faster or just try to get you guys running, what do you think you guys do well to keep the game from going that way to play the style and pace that you want to?

GRAHAM IKE: I think it started in the summer, just all the reps we do, playing 5-on-5. That really helps us. We know our pace. We know that we can't get sped up and we just have to stay in our game and just keep playing together.

DRAKE JEFFRIES: Like Graham said, it goes back to the summer. We worked out every day. We played, play a lot of 5-on-5 this past summer. When teams try to speed us up we take a breath, slow us down and go back to our roots. You fall back on your training.

HUNTER MALDONADO: They've both covered it. It goes back to the summer. All the preparation of guys crawling into us, this non-con and the past couple of games into the conference tournament people trying to speed us up and crawl up under us. At the end of the day if we stick to what we know and our habits I think we can do a good job of being who we are.

Q. You're going to be playing a really storied program a couple hours from their school. How do you think that will affect you? And what are you concerned about with playing a program like that?

DRAKE JEFFRIES: I think we know. Obviously Indiana is a blue-blood basically. Very storied, very good program. Coach Woodson has done a very good job over there.

It's basically going to be almost like a home game for them. We're expecting to be a lot of Indiana fans in here. It's about four hours away from where I'm from. I know we'll have a couple of Wyoming fans in here as well. Excited for that. I just think that it will be fun environment for sure.

GRAHAM IKE: It will be a great environment. Great opportunity for us as a team to keep building on this season that we've been having. That's what that is.

HUNTER MALDONADO: I think on top of that, obviously our non-con prepared us for a team like this, play Arizona, some of those teams away. They're all-tournament teams as well. We've got to go out there, stick to what we know. We're a tournament team here; we're here to play them. At the end of the day if we do what we do, I think we'll put ourselves in a good position.

Q. It's been literally exactly almost 24 hours since your name popped up there. Can you just take us through what you've done in the last 24 hours to get ready for this game?

HUNTER MALDONADO: Like you said we had that watch party, turned around figured out when we were leaving to come here. So go back, watch all the film, get to know their personnel and then get here today, have some practice, go over a couple more things, stuff they like to do tonight. And go out and play.

DRAKE JEFFRIES: What Maldo said, watch film, get ready to get locked in mentally. Quick turnaround, obviously the end of our schedule we played four games in seven days. We're ready to go. We're used to quick turnarounds.

And personally I had homework for my internship, I had to write an article about my emotions of what's been going on lately with this past 24 hours. But it's been fun.

GRAHAM IKE: These two pretty much hit it on the head but just a lot of film trying to see what these guys do and study them and going through some walk-through stuff just so we can be as prepared as possible.

Q. Graham, does their big guy that you were Googling yesterday, have you watched film on him? Does he remind you of anyone you've faced?

GRAHAM IKE: Not necessarily anyone I faced. He reminds me a lot of myself because he's left-handed. So, I understand a little bit of those tendencies. But just watching his game, I like the way he plays, and I like how physical he is. It should be a good matchup.

THE MODERATOR: Thank you. We're joined by Jeff Linder.

COACH LINDER: First, just really excited to be here. It's my third time here. Hopefully the third time is a charm having been here twice as an assistant in 2013 and 2015, knowing that the opportunity to play in the First Four can be a springboard that it has been for a lot of teams, in the case in '13 with LaSalle and in '15 with Dayton.

The team I have -- and we're really unique in terms of kind of how we're constructed and how we play -- and for them to have the opportunity to kind of showcase that and show that on a national stage, I'm excited for that opportunity for them.

And got a great group of kids that have really, in two years, when I got the job back in March of 2020, when the pandemic started, and we're still wearing masks two years later, but to think that what those kids have done in a two-year period of time when we had -- the year before when I got the job they had won seven games, six the year before that -- and for us in two years of COVID, and my staff, we never made excuses. That was the thing we always talked to our guys is that regardless of what's going on, we've got to find a way every day to get better. And I think over the course of two years that's what these guys have bought into. And I think that's the reason why we're here right now being 25-8 and getting an at-large bid when probably two years ago people thought that would never be possible.

Q. Refresh my memory. How did you guys play in those two Boise State games? Did you play well or not play well or run into good opponents? And what did you learn from those experiences to get these guys ready in such a short amount of time?

COACH LINDER: In '13 we played LaSalle. They had a tremendous back court. I know about four minutes into that game -- and we had a good team -- I was, like, man, we're in trouble tonight; it's like we were on skates.

And from that game, LaSalle, Sweet 16 or Elite Eight. And unfortunately we were the first team in NCAA history to play a road game in the NCAA Tournament. We played Dayton in 2015, played that game down to the wire. And Coach Miller after that, I think they went to the Sweet 16 as well.

Good experiences. Dayton is an incredible city. Incredible host. Can't ask for a better place to have this. And it's an opportunity where, if you can kind of get out in front and get that first win underneath your belt, it takes a little bit of that pressure off of you, especially when the other team is kind of waiting for you.

Q. Jeff, now you've had Graham for a full year against teams with people in the building. What have you learned most about your big man on and off the court?

COACH LINDER: Not necessarily what I've learned about him, more so what he's learning, being that this is really his first full year having come off a torn ACL his senior of high school, not being cleared to play until the middle of January last year. Never would have played him because we were always under the impression that he would redshirt.

When he was able to play, given the free COVID year, for him to get that experience was invaluable. But knowing, too, he wasn't able do anything 5-on-5. He wasn't in tip-top shape.

Now, a year later, and you look at him, and just for him to see -- there's no other player in the country that's been doubled as much as he has. We know, you guys know from watching us play in league, I mean, usually he's getting doubled every time down the floor. His usage rate is probably higher than any post player in the history of college basketball.

As a team right now we're probably I think 400 possessions ahead of Purdue in terms of playing through the post and passing out of the post. So this year for him to see every single type of double team and coverage, those possessions are invaluable.

And he's had to have some growing pains. COVID, the one thing about COVID is that it wasn't a regular, it wasn't a real season in terms of feeling the grind of the schedule.

It was a grind you had to test and all the stuff going on. But in terms of actually going through a real 30- to 31-game schedule, where you had to play a game on Friday and then Saturday, and then Monday and Tuesday, they didn't experience that. When you have a team as young as mine where in you're top seven players, you have four COVID freshmen and one true freshman. Those four COVID freshmen didn't feel what that real season felt like.

When we got to mid February this year you could tell that our guys had hit a little bit of a wall. Especially how our schedule in conference got so condensed with the COVID and the makeup schedule. So I think that was the biggest thing is just knowing how your body is going to feel late and knowing, too, that he was the most fouled player in the country all year long.

He was averaging almost eight and a half fouls drawn per 40 minutes. Naturally as the season goes on, especially when you get to middle of February, early March, you don't get as many fouls called. You have to learn how to adjust. I think that's the biggest thing for him is just learning how to adjust with the way that the game's being called, with how the other team is playing you and just the flow of the season, which none of those guys had really felt.

Q. What is it about Hunter Maldonado that allows him to maintain his pace, the deliberate nature of what he does? Obviously Xavier Johnson at Indiana is a guy who likes to play fast. How do you see the contrast of styles playing out?

COACH LINDER: Maldo knows when he plays fast I get mad at him. The way that we use him and the way that he plays -- being that he's 6'6", 6'7", and we use him as -- we're really unorthodox in terms of using him as kind of the old school Mark Jackson, Gary Payton, Charles Barkley, get him into a lot of dribble-downs to where he can use his size. He's an incredible passer.

And people think it looks easy to be able to dribble down and back your guy down from 19 feet. Well, it's in reality, hard to do. And he's got great body control. He was a post player in high school. He naturally knows how to feel his way around.

He's a guy, too, that forces the other team to decide, okay, if you're going to try to guard him small, being 6'6", 6'7", he puts a lot of pressure on you in terms of being able to score.

If you try to put a bigger guy, now he's quick enough and he's shifty enough to where he can create angles that way too. And so he's a tough matchup. And in the case of Xavier Johnson, having watched him on film -- and having watched Indiana actually quite a bit during the regular season, just knowing that in my time as an assistant coach at Boise when I ran the offense, as a head coach at Northern Colorado, and last year at Wyoming, my teams have always been offensively one of the top teams in the country in terms of the number of possessions played in the ball screen.

And knowing that that wasn't going to be the case when we lost Marcus Williams to Texas A&M, Maldo is not necessarily a guy you'll put in that many ball screens.

With him and you add Graham Ike in the mix, knowing that I was going to play through those two guys, the Big Ten is the one league in the country where you're playing through the post most of the teams, whether it's Purdue, Indiana, Illinois -- you're playing through the post -- Michigan.

So I watched a lot of Big Ten basketball just watching how some of those teams try to utilize their post players and some of the different things they did knowing that that's how we play.

So now you watch Indiana on film and in a lot of ways they mirror us in terms of Trayce being on the right side of the floor playing to his left hand. Race on the left side playing to his right hand. And you've got the X factor in Xavier Johnson, who from a talent standpoint is as talented as any guard out there.

Q. You take a job. I know you want to turn things around quickly. You go from 14 to 25 wins. Is that pretty quick?

COACH LINDER: Last year with the shortened schedule, and when we got our full team -- we never had our full team last year without Ike and then we had some injuries to guys -- I thought what we did last year considering you get the job during COVID, you have pretty much an entire new roster. Only kept four guys when I got the job, knowing with COVID it was going to be hard to kind of get enough guys good enough at that level. So we only had 11 scholarship players last year. And we were sitting a couple of guys out.

And then this year, when you lose a guy that was freshman of the year in the league and people are thinking they're not going to be as good, but in reality, we knew that with what we had and knowing that Graham Ike was going to be a year older and he was going to be a guy that now all our guys -- when you had such a young team, we had no summer to work out, we had really no fall. We had so few guys. And you're dealing with all the COVID stuff that you really weren't able to practice. You were just trying to survive.

And so that really hurt us on the defensive end of the floor. And our guys knew that for us to take that next step, especially in our league, which is this year obviously with four teams in the NCAA Tournament, is a league where you've got to be good defensively if you're going to beat a San Diego State, a Boise State or a Colorado State.

We knew we to get better on that end, but to be able to practice in the summertime and the fall, and for those young guys to be able to get the reps they needed to get better, I think that was really the big difference.

Q. I asked the guys about this earlier. I asked them about Coach Wicks. Just wanted to get your thoughts of what he means to your program.

COACH LINDER: I mean, Coach Wicks, along with Coach DeWeese, who was with me for four years at Northern Colorado, and Coach V, who is somebody who was with me who I've known for 20 years, back when he was playing overseas professionally and living in Denver, Colorado. And I think not just Coach Wicks, but all those guys in general, in order for you to have -- for us to make the jump we've had in such a short period of time, you have to have a staff, a really good staff and a staff that's really together.

And that's what I have. I have a staff that, there's no ego. There's no in recruiting and it's my guy; there's just no "I." And when you have that, and I think players, too, know, there's a lot of staffs that in Division I basketball that are not together. There's a lot of agendas. A lot of egos. And I think the players sense that.

And I learned from my time at Boise State under Coach Rice, and him during his time when he was at Gonzaga, the importance of having the right staff, having a staff you can have some cohesion, have some synergy and consistency. By having that, you can have sustained success.

So the energy that Coach Wicks brings every day, it's contagious. You have to have guys that are different than me. And Coach Wicks definitely helps offset my personality and really helps our guys in terms of just bringing that energy every day. That's why he's called the Juice Man.

Q. With the young group, we talked about it all year, they're so young, what's making it this far mean for this group and the future of your program?

COACH LINDER: I think the biggest thing is to validate -- we coach them hard. And in this day and age, I mean, sometimes people say, you can't coach them hard. Well, if they know you know what you're doing, they know you can get them better and that you care about them, you can coach them hard. And we coach them hard every day. That starts June 1st and it doesn't relent.

And when you have guys that want to be coached, and there's some days when they don't want to hear it, but more days than not, you just continue to grow. And I think that's the biggest thing with this group is that even though they're young, they're really mature. They're really smart. Obviously we have almost a 3.5 team GPA but the things that we can grasp and handle, and I think an opportunity like this we had to experience this a couple times this year, quick turnaround having to play San Diego State for the first time on one-day turnaround, having to go play UNLV on a one-day turnaround without playing before. I think those experiences help us hopefully tomorrow night.

Q. One of the benefits of being in the First Four, everyone in the country is going to be watching the game and getting ready to fill out their 64-team brackets, seeing who is in there. What can that exposure do for the program, and next time you go out on the trail you don't have to sell the vision to your next group; you've done it?

COACH LINDER: I think it just goes back to Cody's question, just the validation. Going back to what we do every day, how hard it is over the course of a period of time. Now our guys know, yeah, there's a reason why Coach is crazy a little bit now and then. There's a reason why there's no days off.

And to be able to get the NCAA Tournament helps validate that. And I think on the recruiting trail, when you're able to say, hey, we played in the NCAA Tournament, we're able to get to the NCAA Tournament, we're able to get an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament, which is almost near impossible to do when there's 360 other Division I teams.

It just helps you continue to grow the program. And that's, in two years I think we've come a long, long ways, but we've still got a long ways to go.