NCAA MEN'S FINAL FOUR

March 26, 1999

Jim Calhoun

COACH JIM CALHOUN: Surely, I'll speak the same as the other coaches and be redundant. But we're excited, happy to be here. Since we've left Phoenix last Saturday night, it's been an awful lot of excitement, joy, happiness, and on our part an awful lot of tape-watching preparation. To blend those together, a lot of kids enjoy the moment, as they did for a couple days, and then bring them back to getting ready for their moment in time. I hope it's a chance to do something very special. It has been a balancing act. Our kids have handled it wonderfully. I think they're very focused on what we have to do. Hopefully tomorrow night at 5:42 will reflect that. We'll find out when they throw the ball in.

COACH JIM CALHOUN: I think many times the stat sheet shows one thing. A defensive player does lead us in steals. They talked about steals. In 27 years I've never had anybody -- I mean anybody, and I've had some great defenders -- that could literally tear the head off a dragon, stop a jump shooter. He's splayed kids from five-six to six-eight. He's done an incredible job with them. His offensive plays develop in ability. He's done the same thing as his defense. And you know, he's 20 points a game at least. And that's his kind of goal. Obviously we knew how good he was, but I don't know if we could ever envision him being as good as he has been.

COACH JIM CALHOUN: I don't know if we have an advantage until you play somebody. We never realized how physical Iowa was until we played them, you know. And I think in this particular case we're plus seven or eight on the glass. We have enough time, probably a good rebound team, very quick to the ball between Jake Voskuhl, Kevin Freeman, rebounds, about five a game. Then bringing Souleyman Wane and Edmund Saunders off the bench, we rebound well, not only are we playing very well. So I think the game may or may not, but could somewhat, that the great players on the outside could equalize each other and the game might just go down to whose front court plays the best.

COACH JIM CALHOUN: I think individually. Johnson is an entirely different kind of player. Singleton, I think we've had 13 or 14 tapes now of Ohio State, you know. He can play almost a three, four-ish, he can shoot the ball well enough to pop out. Johnson is basically a post player. In some ways, maybe they have some of the difficulties with Freeman almost at 240 pounds, six-six, six-seven, he can go outside, put it down and go by you and shoot the basketball. But we would handle them, quite frankly, making sure they don't become better because we put so much attention on Scoonie Penn and Michael Redd. That's very important for us. Those are the things that I consider to be sometimes game breakers.

COACH JIM CALHOUN: If you said five-nine in front of him, I'm sure he would have disputed that. But he could play basketball at five-six, six-four, because he's a kid with some great ability as far as quickness, shooting strength. But the greatest asset he has going for him is his character and mindset to try to win every single contest, every single scrimmage and every single game he plays in. That's a very, very unique guy. And, also, when we walked off the floor, he hugged me ten seconds after we qualified and came into the Final Four. On an O for 12 game, never, ever has there been even a hint of him ever caring about himself but not the team. He makes a very unique player, has great gifts, but cares about his team.

COACH JIM CALHOUN: Yeah, he is. Better mentally than anybody I've been with in the 27 years I've been coaching because he truly, truly wants to win so bad.

COACH JIM CALHOUN: It varies in the day between 35 and 15. You know. (Laughter) You have to understand that now.

COACH JIM CALHOUN: 15 we all understand. And that's a stretch on certain days by the way, too. The 35, he just seems to have things in perspective better than most people that I've ever been around. And one of the great things about him, he accepts criticism. He has about an eight-second pout and then tells you you're right. You know, I know I can't do that, and he's really a remarkable young guy. He really is. And he's well versed and wants to know about everything. I love people that you can talk to, and he really, beyond basketball, is, as I said, one of the most interesting people -- not players -- that I've ever been around.

COACH JIM CALHOUN: I was kidding about taking him to church sometimes. He's Muslim, I'm Catholic. He said tell me about the mass, Coach. Any place we're at, he wants to know more about the Wailing Wall and the significance of it when we were in Jerusalem. Whatever the context is, he's inquisitive. He needs to know more about everything. I just love being around those kinds of people.

COACH JIM CALHOUN: We were trying to. It's funny, we like to give the kids what we call hang-ons. This is a Tim James kind of player, guys in our league, guys like Mateen Cleaves, guys we've played against, he's tough to find. We had a kid named Owens (phonetic spelling) last year who was a league player from West Virginia. Inside he's kind of like an Owens player. Outside, he reminds me of Richard Hamilton because he starts up and can really -- the separation between those two aspects is the fact he can really, really break you down either with a crossover or just a little fake by you. He really is an exceptional player. I don't think, quite frankly, as much as I watched him and being a basketball guy who watches a lot of it during the year, I truly, truly understand just how terrific he is. 30 points for him on any given night, he's probably one of the best post-up players, a tremendous three-point shooter, and can create his own offense. He's a special player. We're trying to find a similar kind of player and we haven't really got that kind of player yet.

COACH JIM CALHOUN: The more we watched this week, the thing that Jimmy does, in my opinion, he did this at B.C. when he had Dana Boroughs, Dana Boroughs got all the points at the right time. When he had Billy Curry, Howard Eisely, Mike Huckleby, they were all in the right spots at the right time. I think Jim O'Brien may be as efficient an offensive coach as anybody in America. I've always felt the teams are so hard to defend because they always put their people in the right spots and the right people take the right shots at the right time. That's always a judgment of the right coach, a tremendous offensive coach and a guy who understands the game of basketball.

COACH JIM CALHOUN: No, I'm not.

COACH JIM CALHOUN: Yeah. We should be a big underdog. I think it's, again, 9,000 to 1 that you keep doing that. I think the venues change. As I said before, someone asked me how it happened. When Jimmy had good teams, we had very good teams. When Jimmy had the Eisely-Edmund team, they were terrific. We had Marshall, Ray Allen, Travis Knight, guys who are now making a living in the NBA, we had a great team. So it always seemed like we had a curve ball. When P.J. was playing in our league and coaching against Jim Payton (phonetic spelling), Seton Hall lost to Syracuse 23 straight in that interim. During the streak, P.J. went from one foul shot away from the National Championship, so the relevance of it here is nonexistent in my opinion.

COACH JIM CALHOUN: Mostly personal feelings about Joe are kept in our team. He was a manager, for us, a young man we met in 1990, had a short time to live. Fortunately, with modern medicine he was able to make a great, great recovery. In the last nine or ten years he became a symbol for me in the way of a guy with incredible courage. He went to college, graduated, worked for ESPN and was one of the most exceptional people that I've ever met. And when he did pass from us, his mom said to me, she started telling me all the things that kept his last ten years so important. I told her I cheated because she thought that I was giving to Joe, but Joe had given much more to me. I learned true courage. You had all the witticisms, the things he said and the way he was. I really cheated because I got much more from Joe in the beginning.

COACH JIM CALHOUN: First thing, I think the matchup block is key. If Johnson plays like he did against Ohio State, I thought that was the entire key to the game, when St. Johns was missing shots. But the thing they always do is come back at you, try to penetrate to the rim, which is a great strategy, but he stopped all of that. So I think that Voskuhl, Johnson matchup becomes maybe the single most important matchup in the game. Both rely on their size, physicalness and rely upon them for defense. When Jake is out of the game, I can give you all the stats you want but he's setting screens, being an anchor on defense, providing us muscle and size, he's that important to us. Every game he's played well, we play well.

COACH JIM CALHOUN: He's played against players like Eton Thomas (phonetic spelling), who was in Syracuse, Matteson and Young in Stanford. So he's in a pretty good field about playing these people. The thing about Jake is I really knew he was going to be a good player. It isn't like he dominates six-foot-five guys or, in fact, dominates seven-footers. He plays his game almost against everybody. The key for us is not to allow him to get into foul trouble. That's a very big key for us. So Johnson's a terrific talent, developing talent. And we just have to hope he doesn't have the kind of game he had on Saturday.

COACH JIM CALHOUN: Well, I think the reason that they're so important, first, is the fact that in college basketball because of legislation you just can't find isolation and folks have to play five on five, not two on two or one on one. And, therefore, the people that have the ball in their hands most control the game. And it's kind of that simple. If you look at the good teams over the past decade, particularly in college basketball, you will see that no one has really won without a great point guard. Between the team, we have Avery who, as you know, was a high school teammate of Ricky Moore, to Scoonie, to Khalid and Ricky on our team. Clearly, each of them -- each of the teams were -- not just the same, as good as Duke and Michigan State is, we have clearly not the same developed. I don't think there's any question. They're certainly part of the recipe you need for success in college basketball. You are not going to get here without having that kind of player, a guy who controls the ball.

COACH JIM CALHOUN: Yeah. You know, I think one of the reasons we had a great deal of success in the '90s, clearly the fact that we've had those kind of kids who've done that. Going back to the line and could press, Travis Knight who was playing with Ray Allen and Don Marshall (phonetic spelling), his job was to set screens and rebound and block shots. We've been fortunate to have kids that do that. Ricky probably epitomizes what you need in a program to win. He was a great high school player, scored 38 points in the State Championship win for his high school team, came in and was asked by the time he was a junior to start changing his whole role. Obviously, he's done a magnificent job doing that.