NCAA MEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP: FIRST ROUND - YALE VS PURDUE

March 17, 2022

Jalen Gabbidon

Azar Swain

James Jones

Fiserv Forum

Yale Bulldogs

Media Conference

MODERATOR: Good morning and welcome to Milwaukee. I'm Dennis Crouse, and when I call you, we ask that you identify yourself and your media outlet. We are joined by student-athletes Azar Swain and Jalen Gabbidon. Questions, please?

Q. For each of you, I'm just wondering what y'all went through last year? What was your routine like with no basketball in the Ivy League, and what kept y'all there? A couple guys ended up transferring. What made y'all decide to stay at Yale and wait it out?

JALEN GABBIDON: I think what made me stay personally was Coach Jones. I have a lot of trust and belief in Coach Jones, and he's done nothing but amazing things for me as a person since I've been at Yale. So he's given me a great opportunity to go to one of the best institutions in the world. I thought it was right to take one year off and play one more year with him.

AZAR SWAIN: I've said it before, but Yale and Coach Jones changed my life. It really wasn't much thought as far as, like, preserving my eligibility. Yale is where I want to be, where I started, and I felt like with the year, how it ended, my junior year, it felt a little bit like unfinished business, so it was good to be able to come back in, give something to Yale.

Q. Can you just speak to Purdue's size and what you've seen on film and what you expect to see in person and how you guys are preparing yourselves for that.

AZAR SWAIN: I think it's a given. Everybody knows that they're big. And they've been one of the top teams all year, so they've been on a national stage and in the limelight. So their size isn't something that's been hidden or anything like that. As far as us, we're looking kind of inwards and making sure that the little things like toughness and physicality aren't going to lack, and we'll be ready to compete regardless of size.

Q. I was just wondering if you could describe where you were watching the game last night and your reaction when Paul made the winning bucket?

JALEN GABBIDON: I was actually in the weight room doing some late-night recovery, rehab work and was watching on the TV. When it happened, I literally, like, screamed in the hotel. It's funny seeing Paul have, like, 26 on national TV. We felt like he's an incredible player. Obviously, we thought we were going to have our run in March Madness together the last time we were at Yale. So for him to come out here and win a game and being a key part of Notre Dame just brought me a lot of joy for him.

Q. Going back to last year, I'm curious the things that the coaching staff did to try to keep you guys engaged as a team. Were you able to watch the tournament without -- I mean, without hurt feelings not being able to be out there yourselves?

AZAR SWAIN: Yeah. Personally, I was able to watch the tournament. It's almost like our time was coming. We took the year off. We knew that we were going to come back reloaded and ready to go the next year. That was almost excitement for me, like I'm getting ready to go back to this. I'm ready to get back on that stage again. During COVID, we had biweekly meetings as a team where we talked about social justice issues, whether it's COVID or Black Lives Matter or anything else that's happening in the world. Every other week, we would have a meeting together. We would watch a video, something along those lines, and discuss it as a team just to keep us connected and keep us in touch with each other. Sometimes we would have guest speakers. Like we had Coach Stevens from the Celtics. We had speakers on who talked to us just about basketball and life in general. That was a really neat thing that we did.

Q. Following up on his question, the stuff you were able to do last year, how much did it help in terms of establishing chemistry and not being rusty and having to reintroduce things when you came back this season?

JALEN GABBIDON: Well, we were rusty. At the beginning of the year, we had nine new guys on our team and 10 guys returning, so it was almost a 50/50 split between new and old guys, and so the rest was inevitable. We haven't played with each other in a year. But we're -- this is probably the closest team I've ever been on in terms of off-the-court personalities. Being able to communicate with each other through Zoom and through the past year has been really great for our chemistries. And obviously as the season went on, that started to develop and the on-court chemistry. Now you can see we play like a team. We play very together, and that's what we pride ourselves on. That's why we have a shot at any game we'll ever play is because of that.

Q. Azar, can you describe, I guess, is there a level of frustration amongst Ivy League athletes of just kind of the hoops that you have to jump through if you're injured? You have to basically drop out of school to have a red shirt year, just some of the things that went through. You guys watched everybody else play last year. I know it's the same thing with baseball players in the spring. Is there a feeling of -- I guess can you describe maybe just how you feel like an athlete's place is on an Ivy League campus?

AZAR SWAIN: I think a lot of people have their own opinions, and obviously it varies by sport and things like that. But the Ivy League has a long history of tradition. And as far as for me personally, I never looked at it as, like, against an Ivy League type of thing. Like, I understood the rules when I came here. And obviously within COVID and changing times, it was a difficult time. I can't even imagine for, like, policymakers and all that type of stuff, the decisions they've had to make over the year, even within the NCAA.

I mean, obviously within an Ivy League campus as an athlete, you're respected, and it's not really like an administration versus -- I feel like I've seen a lot of takes on that, versus the students, but rules are the rules. It's way above my head. And with the COVID policies and the rules and stuff like that, I understood them, and I was going to do whatever it took to be back at Yale, and that's what it was.

Q. Azar, you've broken a few program records already in your Yale career. You'll break a new one for career games played tomorrow. What does that mark mean, and how do you wrap your mind around 121 appearances?

AZAR SWAIN: Yeah. That's probably the coolest record I can kind of brag about just because the time flies by. Like, I'm a veteran now. I'm the one with all the experience and stuff like that. It really doesn't feel like that still. Obviously, I'm a leader in that sense in -- on our team, but within me, I still feel like I'm, you know, an 18-year old with a lot of time left in my career here. Obviously, that's not the case, and I'm just thankful to have stayed healthy and be able to have the opportunity to play in games from Coach Jones. I'm just grateful. There's a lot of things that need to come together for something like that to happen. I'm just grateful.

Q. Going back to Paul Atkinson, how much do you still communicate with him, and did either of you send a text or anything, or did you talk to him since that game last night?

AZAR SWAIN: I woke up this morning and -- obviously with last night, I understand how he probably has a million people texting him, so I shot him a text early this morning just telling him I'm super proud of him, super happy for him. Kind of like Jalen said, we're all in this together, felt like we had a lot of things that we could have still accomplished together. Things happen, roads, things come to an end, and just super proud of him, super happy he's able to shine in a moment like that because it's been a long time coming for him.

MODERATOR: Anything else for the athletes?

Q. I guess I'll ask you about kind of the what-if game and if he had stayed, what would this team be like?

JALEN GABBIDON: Scary team.

AZAR SWAIN: I mean, it goes without saying he was the Ivy League Player of the Year, so we bring back an Ivy League Player of the Year to a team that we have this year with all the freshmen who stepped up and things like that. I mean, I guess we'll never know.

MODERATOR: Guys, thank you. Good luck tomorrow.

So we're joined now by Yale head coach James Jones. Questions, please?

Q. I was just wondering: Your players have talked about what y'all did last year having some guest speakers, that type of thing in order to stay engaged, keep the chemistry going while they didn't play. How did you come up with that idea, and just what was it like as a coach to try to prepare a team for a year from now when you couldn't play at all?

COACH JAMES JONES: Well, as you could imagine, it was difficult being away from my guys and away from Yale and being connected personally and face-to-face. So just to try to keep them engaged, we thought it was a good idea to have some guest speakers come in from the NBA, something that they would be interested in and intrigued by. So we did that. We also did a lot of Zooms on equity and inclusion to try to keep us together. And understanding each other was a big part of that. We spent a lot of time doing that. I thought it was helpful for us to have a voice together and have guys share and to learn from each other. It was really good. It was a way of staying together. But we always had an eye on the opportunity to play again, and I will tell you that our first practice in September, I will never forget as long as I'm allowed to live, the smile on EJ Jarvis's face when we had our first practice, the excitement that we had getting back on the court and being able to do what we do. It was tremendous. And sometimes something has to be taken away from you for you to realize how much you enjoy it to miss it.

Q. Coach, I'm wondering if you could speak to the challenges of Purdue's size and what you're doing to prepare for that and how different that is from what you saw during the season.

COACH JAMES JONES: Well, that's different from what everybody sees during the season. Who has a 7-4, 300-pound man on their team? Nobody except for Purdue. So, obviously, for us, it's going to be a challenge because we're a little bit smaller in size than a lot of teams. We basically start a 3-man Isaiah at the five because we had so many injuries this year. So we have to do it by committee. We have to get a little bit more from everybody. We've got to block out and chase the ball and do the best we can because now they do have a size advantage against us.

Q. With that, how did you simulate Zach Edey's size? I assume, if you had a 7-4 guy on campus, he would be on your team.

COACH JAMES JONES: I went out, and I got a dump truck, and I brought it to practice, and I put it in the middle of the floor, and I tried to get the guys to move the dump truck with it in park. You can't simulate it. You can talk as much as you can, you you can't simulate it. What you can do is make sure your guys understand the importance of what their jobs are and what their importance -- what their jobs are and how to do their jobs. So we've gotten together, and we've worked hard about trying to squeeze the floor and make it tougher and holding your ground, doing your work early, understanding they run a lot of misdirection plays to try to get the ball inside to Edey. And everything he does is trying to get deep position at the basket, so we want to make sure that we can take that away as best as possible.

Q. You know Jaden Ivey from a couple perspectives. What are your thoughts on him?

COACH JAMES JONES: Jaden and I were together with USA Basketball over the summer. We took a team to Latvia along with Caleb Furst. And he's probably one of the fastest beings I've ever seen with the basketball going up and down the court, tremendous talent. He'll be a lottery pick, and we've just got to make sure that we try to slow him down as much as possible. And that's not an easy task because he's an outstanding talent.

Q. Your history with Matt Painter, when did you first meet him, and what has he kind of meant to your career, and what have you kind of gleaned from him over the last several years?

COACH JAMES JONES: Well, I haven't -- I didn't really get a chance to know Matt well until this past year when -- the USA Basketball trip that -- he was on the committee for the -- I think he's the president of the committee for the U-19 team, so we had a chance to talk basketball a little bit here. I heard him speak at a clinic down in Florida years back when Billy Donovan was coaching down there. He's obviously done a great job at Purdue. He does a marvelous offensive talent. They run great offense. So he's somebody that you admire from what he does from that standpoint. Purdue was the No. 1 team in the country for parts of this year and for good reason.

Q. Over the last couple years, it's been quite a talent drain in the Ivy League with most of them being grad transfers and some of the better players moving on, I think, in large part because of the Ivy League's rules about not allowing graduate students to play. Is there a compelling reason that -- in your mind, that that ought to be changed?

COACH JAMES JONES: Okay. So this past year, they did allow graduate students to participate in NCAA. And the compelling reason -- actually, I'm not sure what the compelling reason is. I'll take it a step back from that.

Everyone in the country's allowed to have red shirts, and that's the bigger issue, not so much graduate students, that you can have red shirts. The reason we don't red shirt in the Ivy League is because that takes the position away from another worthy young man or woman to get into the university. So if you could red shirt, that's one less student that could come to the university that year, and then they would open it up for other students to take another opportunity out to red shirt or take a gap year, so to speak, and clog up the university in terms of the number of students that are going to be admitted.

All I know is that I have a roster of 19 guys because of COVID, a number of guys that came back, and I've got to play with the guys I have, and that's what I'm tasked with. Paul Atkinson played for Notre Dame last night, and he wasn't too bad. He didn't stink, so it wouldn't be bad if he was playing for us tonight, but he's not, so we have the guys in the locker room. I'm proud of them to get us to this point and looking forward to see what we can do.

Q. Is it helpful in a way that a guy like Paul, even though he's not playing for an Ivy League school, has a moment in a game like last night, just speaks to the quality of the play in your league?

COACH JAMES JONES: Well, I'm happy for Paul because I love him. He's a great kid. When he was a freshman, he would barely say three words to me. And when he was a junior, all he did was bust my chops every chance he got. He's a great kid, came from a great family. I'm happy for him and what he was able to do with Notre Dame this year. It speaks volumes. We have a bunch of players that have been grad transferred. Makai Mason went down to Baylor, and he was all Big 12 selection. Jordan Bruner was a starting center for Alabama before he got hurt. Yeah, we've had a lot of quality players. Anybody that knows anything about college basketball knows that. Maybe the average basketball fan doesn't but that's okay, too.

Q. For those of us who haven't seen your team play quite as much, can you break down Swain for us, tell us what's made him so good for you?

COACH JAMES JONES: He's just a tough nut. He is the best player in the entire country that can't dunk a basketball. You find somebody that's better at that than him, that can't dunk a basketball, and I'd call you a liar. He's tremendous, really tough kid, hard-nosed, is absolutely fearless. And he never met a shot he didn't like. His shot selection has gotten better here over the last couple games, which makes his coach happy, but he'll shoot from anywhere. He's fairly accurate in terms of doing that. We're happy to have him. He's a great leader for our program, and he's done a tremendous job over the last four years at Yale, because he had to sit out of school to be able to come back and play to get his fourth year because he wanted to play four years at Yale, as well as Jalen Gabbidon and Jamila ^^. So I'm proud of those guys for coming back and being able to get us to this point.

Q. Going back to the speakers you had last year, I know Brad Stevens was one. Who were some of the other guys that y'all had speak to the team?

COACH JAMES JONES: Steve Clifford from the Orlando Magic. We had Silas from the Houston Rockets, and we also had Altman from the Cleveland Cavaliers. So we had a bunch of guys come on. Those are relationships that I had with guys to come out and speak to the young men in our program.

We also had Isaiah Thomas speak to our guys. I did, also, a stint with USA Basketball where we went to Puerto Rico and played some games down there. Isaiah was good enough to talk to some of the guys about what it took for him to try to come back to the NBA. There were a lot of different perspectives our guys got a chance to see. It was great for them to be able to have those conversations because they all, as young men, look up to being an NBA guy, those thoughts and dreams we all had.

Q. (No microphone.)

COACH JAMES JONES: Former Celtic Isaiah Thomas, yes.

Q. You've gone through this March Madness routine a few times now. Just curious what this week has been like for you and at what point the celebration on Sunday shifted to focus prep for Purdue.

COACH JAMES JONES: It was one of those things. In terms of a celebration, it was fast and furious. You know, you're so focused on trying to win the game, do your best in the game, you don't really think about the celebration. It goes quickly. What's great about the world now is that everything's on Instagram, so I got a chance to relive some of the moments of my players, and it's fun to see their joy and their happiness throughout what they achieved.

In terms of shifting to Purdue, Sunday night, I started watching video. You know, I've obviously seen them play live several times throughout the year because Jaden Ivey and Caleb, Matt Painter are guys that I have relationships with. So you like to watch the people that you know, so I did a little bit of that. And we started building on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. And it was our final prep day Thursday, and we'll go out and see if we're ready.

Q. Who were some of the other speakers that you might have had, nonbasketball, that -- you know, maybe on social justice issues?

COACH JAMES JONES: So we didn't have any other speakers for that outside of what we did as our university and our athletic director put together. But what we did -- we did a lot of TED Talks where we brought up different subjects on violence against transgender people, violence against Asians, violence against African-Americans. We put those TED Talks out, had them view them, and then we had discussions talking about where we are with them and how you feel and what our thoughts about things are. So we did a lot of things like that. Again, it was something our staff put together to try to make sure that we had a grasp and understanding.

I think the biggest problems we have in our country is ignorance, that we don't understand each other. And the greater understanding we have, the easier it is to live together. We wanted to make sure we touched a lot of different topics and had our guys look into a lot of different things to make sure that we could all come together and be the best that we could.

Q. Can you just describe the conversations that you had with Paul and just kind of his decision of -- that ultimately led to him going to Notre Dame?

COACH JAMES JONES: Well, so once the season was canceled and we were back in school, he knew he was going to have an extra year to go play, so he went -- we had a discussion about him going into the portal. And obviously a number of schools in the country, everybody from North Carolina to Duke to Florida -- everybody in the country wanted to talk to him for the most part.

He settled on a great academic environment for him because, obviously, he chose Yale because of what it was academically as well as what we are athletically. In February, I believe it was, the rule changed for the Ivy League that would allow graduate students to come back and play. At that point, he had already committed to Notre Dame back in November, so he would have had to renege on his commitment to them, and then we would have had to pay for graduate school, which is around 75K. He likes Coach Jones a lot, but he doesn't like Coach Jones that much, so he decided he was going to stick with his commitment and go play at Notre Dame.

In the preseason, there was like the bracketology, and it had Yale and Notre Dame in the same region. He sent me a photocopy of it. He said wouldn't this be great if we could play against each other. So we've had those discussions throughout the year. Like I said, he's a great kid, and I wish him nothing but the best.

Q. I wonder if you can pinpoint a connective tissue between this team, your past teams, and the other Ivy League teams that just seem to always show up in the NCAA Tournament. You've got the Princeton, Harvard, even Colgate going back a decade. Seems like either they win a game or they cause a lot of problems for the team that ultimately bests them. What do you think connects those things?

COACH JAMES JONES: Well, what connects our program is our core values of what we try to do on the court. We want to defend, we want to rebound, and we want to share the ball. We don't always do all three of them at the highest level. There may be some years that we do one a little bit more than the other and one a little bit less than we normally would like. This year, our defense has been really good, but our sharing of the ball in terms of our assists are not as great as they have been. So our connection is through our belief system and what we think is important in terms of how to play.

Now, I will tell you, I told my staff that this is probably the best coaching job we've been able to do in terms of getting a team to the tournament just because our talent level isn't at the same level as it had been with the past teams we had. Like, we had a pro, Miye Oni, who was on our team the last time we came to the NCAA Tournament and had a guard by the name of Alex Copeland who dropped 25 or 26 on LSU, right? So we had some guys. We do it a different way now. It's mainly done defensively to try to get stops and playing together that way. That would probably be the connective tissue that we would have from one year to the next.

MODERATOR: Anything else for Coach?

Q. You played a pretty -- very competitive schedule this year, and you had some kind of one-sided losses to some really good teams early in the season.

COACH JAMES JONES: Nice. Well put.

Q. Yeah. So I guess could you maybe describe, maybe, just some of the areas that you feel like you've really gotten better at. And I imagine some of that was maybe some of the rustiness, maybe not.

COACH JAMES JONES: No, it had nothing to do with rust. It had everything to do with the fact that we had no post players. I started Jalen Gabbidon out at the 4, and he's a 3 man from the year before. And I started Isaiah Kelly at the 5, and he was a 3 man. We had no scoring at the basket at all. E.J. Jarvis was hurt. Jameel Alausa was out. E.J.'s back now. Jameel is still injured. He can't play.

But Matt Knowling was a second-year player that obviously didn't have his freshman year because of COVID. We put him in the starting lineup along with Bez Mbeng. So that team that we were at the beginning of the year with those lopsided losses we had, we're a little bit of a different team than we were then in terms of how we play and who we play.

Every year after the season's over, I go back and I watch all the games that we played, like this year, like from two years ago. I probably watched every game like four times because I had nothing else to do. So I will go back and watch the games this year, and I'm going to watch tape, and I'm going to say to myself, why did I play this guy, why did I play that guy, because, again, we were trying to figure out who our best guys were, building a team. Sometimes that forms sooner than other years. This year, it took a while because of the injuries that we had. So we're a different team, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what this group of guys can come out to do together.

MODERATOR: Thanks, Coach. Good luck tomorrow.