NCAA MEN'S FINAL FOUR

March 26, 1997

Lute Olson

Dean Smith

COACH OLSON: We're very excited about having an opportunity to play in the Final Four. We're excited about being able to come to Indianapolis and a great basketball area like that. I know our players are excited and anxious to get there. As far as our team right now, I think we're playing very well. We've not made it easy in terms of getting there with all four of the games going down to the wire. But without a doubt we're playing the best basketball that we have all year long. For a while we had just primarily a perimeter-oriented ball club. With the young guys that we have inside and now over the last month or so we've really gotten good, solid contributions from A.J. Bramlett and Bennett Davison, so we're as ready as we can be, I think.

COACH SMITH: I share Coach Olson's excitement about being in the Final Four. We feel pleased and fortunate to be one of the four teams remaining. We also realize that we're playing an Arizona team that is the top of their game. And I hope we are, also. When Arizona and North Carolina met, the first game of the season, both teams were young, and both teams have improved a great deal. Certainly I'm impressed with the fact that Bramlett, he mentioned, had 7 offensive rebounds against Kansas, and along with Harris, Davison and Edgerson, really dominated what I thought was the best front line in America. And certainly they should be very pleased not only with that win, but with the others. They're a very quick team, and quicker than we are. We have one player with size more than their two, 6-11's with Serge Zwikker. And I really think it should be an exciting game and one that could go down to the wire. Of course they're used to it. I think one of the -- I'm impressed with Arizona's two losses at Cal and at Stanford. I don't know any team going in one weekend and play a one-point and two-point game. Even though they lost or they would have been a higher seed. And of course seedings do not mean a thing at that time this point in how well you're playing, and Arizona is playing well. North Carolina is playing well and we'll see what happens.

COACH OLSON: It's really been a fun year for us, I think from the coaching standpoint and also from a fan standpoint. Because there were not a whole lot of experience and with Miles Simon being the only returning starter and some of the guys with very, very little experience as far as the inside guys are concerned. All that I had said at the start of the year to our fans is you're going to enjoy this year; they're going to be fun. But there will be times you see me covering my eyes on the bench in terms of what we may do at different segments of the game. But it's been a great year for us. The guys have played hard, they've practiced very hard. They're a very together group, both on and off the court. Once we got Miles back we had some adjustments we had to make in terms of getting him back into the lineup, getting him healthy and then having other guys accept roles that may have been different than what we they were before. It's been a satisfying year. I don't remember a team that came into a year with so many question marks that could get as far as what they've gotten now. And they feel now that they're one of four, why, it could be anybody's game.

COACH OLSON: I think that matchup is going to be can you have key matchups in the game? And I know with Carolina with the way they're playing right now, everybody is so involved and I can't get over how fine-tuned their offense is at this point. The pass always seems to be there right at the time it needs to be there and all of that. But if you were to look at individual matchups, certainly that one is going to be a real key. Bennett Davison has struggled off and on offensively for us, but the one thing that has remained very constant with him has been his ability to defend. He's really done a great job on I think two of the most outstanding forwards in the country in Rachel trends and Keith Van Horn. And I think his quickness bothered both of those guys. The difference now with Jamison is that Jamison is equally as quick and his teammates do such a fabulous job of getting him open to get him the basketball. It will be the biggest challenge I think that Bennett has had all year long. He's gaining a lot of confidence I think now in the offensive end. Early it was a big adjustment for him to have to play against people the size that he was playing against, because in junior college easily it was 6' 6" guys or 6' 5" guys. But the premium that we've tried to place on him is use your quickness and keep the ball off the floor, let's catch it and use that quickness to get up in the air to take the ball at the line. So he's made outstanding progress for us. I mentioned earlier A.J. Bramlett, I've been in coaching now 40 years, and A.J. Bramlett has improved more from the start of the season to the end of the season than any player I've ever had. And I think a lot of that has to do with confidence. He did not get a lot of playing time last year as a freshman. And I think his teammates have done a great job of involving him and constantly helping him with the confidence level. So we feel a whole lot better right now about what's going on inside than we did before.

COACH OLSON: I think guards are much more difficult to deal with defensively, because they have so much space with which to operate. If you've got a great inside player, why then you're going to have to deal with 2 and 3 men coming down on him, doing that kind of thing, where guards just have so much room to operate and there's not a whole lot you can do to give help in certain situations to stop a guard like Stoddemeyer and Reeves for us when we made the run in the Final Four, '94. It was a case of where you might contain them for a while, but sooner or later they were going to find space to really hurt you. With our team this year, the only reason we were perimeter oriented, especially early, was the lack of any kind of experience on the inside. But I think now it's a case of where you're seeing more involvement by the inside guys and a better balance to our game.

COACH SMITH: I think that's the excitement of any staff is to see the team respected and happy and have a positive experience. I go back even '76 on the Montreal Gold Medal when the 12 players were up there and Tom Johnson and Bill Guthry and I standing on the side excited, almost tearful what they're experiencing, but certainly the staff is happy, as well. I meant to say while I have the mic here, I forgot to tell the writers when we played Arizona before Miles Simon was not in the lineup and he has a sensational player. And they still had us by 17 points about 8 minutes of play. So I hope we've improved or it would be a blow out.

COACH SMITH: Well, Vince really is playing on the perimeter as is Dickerson, and certainly Vince has improved more during the season than I could have imagined on the defensive end. He's working very hard. And certainly he can shoot it outside and where you can try to get him to do a better job driving and get to the foul line. He hasn't been to the foul line much, and we'd like to have that improvement come. But he's really worked hard defensively, and obviously can jump. But people don't stay in the air; it's rebounding. Most defensive rebounds are received below the head, but we're very pleased with his effort defensively and his continued progress.

COACH OLSON: Michael Dickerson has been the player that's really had to carry us a lot of different times this year, particularly before Miles became eligible. Michael has, in my opinion, the most explosive first step that we've had here at Arizona since Sean Elliot. He's developed his game to the point now where when he first came here it was either the outside jump shot or right to the iron. And he got himself in a lot of trouble as a result of that. But now he's worked on his game to where he can take it off the dribble for one dribble and get good elevation and good body control prior to the shot. The difference between the two teams -- the two players, I think, that you're talking about, Carter is such a force on the inside on the offensive glass and on lobs and on post-ups, where Michael is much more the guard-type player, even though we refer to him as a forward or small forward. But he really plays a whole lot more like a guard, I think, than he does a forward.

COACH SMITH: Actually I won't even let our team watch the game. I'm sure both -- I don't know what Lute's done from the standpoint, that's so long ago, both teams are so different now they have Simon now. And I pointed out Dickerson only got 31 against us. And I thought Mike Bibby playing in his first game was just remarkable, and he continues to be -- he and Ed Cota are out standing pointguards, and you could add freshmen, but they really are playing just as great college pointguards. And Bibby got the best of that matchup. But it's not a one-on-one game. I'm sure Henry Bibby and Ed Cota are interested in their team's winning, No. 1.

COACH OLSON: I agree with Dean's assessment as far as the first one. We have not allowed our players to watch that, either. To watch, from a coaching standpoint we have watched it, but it's like it's not even the same team that we're facing with Carolina. At that point I think as young as they were, they were searching for what their roles were, and I think now you take a look, if one takes a look at their -- the individual players statistics. For example, for the first half of the ACC and then take a look at it from that point on, and it's like a totally different team. The shooting percentages are way up, turnovers are down. As I mentioned earlier the precision of the offense is just -- is mind boggling. As I watch it I don't recall watching a team on tape that executes better in half court than what Carolina is doing right now.

COACH OLSON: This has been a really competitive team, that we go back to the schedule and with two minutes to go in any of those losses we had an opportunity to win. We were either ahead or tied or one point differential or whatever. And when you look at the playing on the road in our conference this year, UCLA was the only team that finished with a -- more wins than losses on the road, and frankly they were very fortunate in a number of situations where they hit shots at the buzzer or whatever, or they could very well have been under 500 on the road, as well. When you take a look at say the gains at USC and at UCLA, there was some extenuating circumstances there with the USC game at UCLA, that was an overtime game that we had shots to win at the conclusion of regulation, we had a shot to win at the conclusion of the overtime. So the biggest thing is that I've always felt that you learn a whole lot more from close games, whether you win them or lose them than you do from blow out situations. And I think with our team it's just been a matter of steady growth for them throughout the year. I've had people ask, well, do you think they were playing as well in the PAC as they were in some of those earlier games. Hey, it's a lot different playing against nonconference opponents than it is playing in your league, and when you're playing not on neutral courts but on the home team's court. And it makes a whole lot of difference in the outcome of the games. But I think our improvement has been pretty steady, even as Dean mentioned the losses of Stanford and Cal, I thought we played the best basketball of the year to that point, and still we lost by one point or one and two, I guess.

COACH SMITH: I don't see where the excitement is gone. Certainly the parity is here. And maybe we would have been better with Stackhouse and Wallace as seniors, McGinnis as a senior. But that's part of life. And that they should move on to a job that they feel they can do well and still get their degree. I think you'll find that they're still just good basketball players throughout and while some of them are younger, like Arizona is young, and we're young, but still there are some that are senior teams, and they've generally done well in the tournament. But I don't see it's going to create a lack of interest in the Final Four, because it's just so big, and college is so much fun and enthusiasm and we have a special game in college basketball.

COACH OLSON: I would agree completely with that. And if you take a look at the tournament results this year, the number of overtime games, the number of games that went down to a final shot, the excitement is there, and I think when you look at the college crowds and the enthusiasm from the players' standpoint and the fans' standpoint it's a tough game to beat. Now, obviously there's some players that came out that would have made some teams better, but I don't think it would have made the season anymore exciting, frankly, than what it's been.

COACH OLSON: Well, I think back on my first time, which was back in 1980 with an Iowa team going into Indianapolis. I had no clue of all the hoopla surrounding the teams and what you had to go through during the course of the week. And after that experience the next time that we went with an Arizona team in '88, why, I handled things a whole lot differently at that point than I had before. I think each year that you go through it, this being my fourth now, that I think there's certain things that you learn each time around. But maybe the main thing now is to get the teams out of your own locale and get them to Indianapolis. And people think, well, that's crazy, because look at the hoopla that's involved there. But the whole thing is we have them under our control then for 24 hours a day. We can determine when they're going to go out and walk around. We can determine when they're going to eat. Whereas when they're in town, right now, it is really hectic for them. I can see why Minnesota came in -- went into Indianapolis yesterday just to get control of the situation.

COACH SMITH: Actually, I guess from '67 to now a lot has changed even with a Final Four. But in general terms, and the big hoopla came after -- somewhere between '72 and '77 when we didn't go. We did go in '72 and '77 and I couldn't believe the difference. And yet I believe -- I'd like our team to approach it as Arizona is the next game on our schedule and we'll keep them in school as long as the NCAA will allow us, we're not on spring break. And we'll come into Indianapolis and practice and treat it like we would any other game, knowing full well that it isn't, but yet I think each team has already won four big, big games to get where they are. And they had to be big, because they're not your home. So this is just a continuation of that.

COACH OLSON: I don't know, that's out of my control. I think our program stands on its own, and the current players, we've got two kids who were here, the juniors that were here three years. So you can't control what people are going to say. Our program has been an outstanding program for a number of years now and we don't feel we need to protect that at all.

COACH SMITH: I'd like to add that Coach Olson has proven among coaches, and that would be the best judge of who can coach, and he certainly can, and whether any coach loses in the NCAA, it's much too magnified. It's important to get there and you can lose a game during the season and you can lose a game in the NCAA and we know full well that this isn't the best method to determine the champion, but it certainly creates interest. The NBA went to one game and you're out, you'd have fantastic interest.