BIG EAST CONFERENCE MEN'S TOURNAMENT

March 8, 2002

Marcus Barnes

Perry Clark

John Salmons

Elton Tyler

COACH PERRY CLARK: Coming in, I made the comment that Pittsburgh does what they do better than anybody in this league. I think tonight they really showed you just how efficient they are. Knight does a tremendous job of running the offense. And even when we had runs, they never really took them out of what they wanted to do. Defensively, we just couldn't come up and make the stops when we wanted to. We wanted to get the ball to Elton, I thought we were very successful with that. We were able to play off of him. And, you know, we had our chances. But whenever they needed to come up with the play to either stop a run or to get momentum back, they were able to do that. I think you have to give them credit because truly they are an outstanding basketball team. And that's the way they played all year. And, you know, basically we just got to go home and regroup and get ready for the NCAA.

COACH PERRY CLARK: Well, you know, people were really -- they were really up on him and taking him away. I thought that, you know, that opened up some other things. I thought it opened up Marcus. It opened up E for us to be able to feed the ball in to him. You know, that's something that we asked God to do. I mean, we're a team. To me, when people try to take one part of our game away, it creates openings in other parts. I thought we did a good job tonight taking advantage of that. I thought our problems were on the defensive end.

COACH PERRY CLARK: Well, I mean, certainly. But right now we're really disappointed. We wanted to win. We fell short. So we've, you know, right now we don't feel real good. But, I mean, certainly I thought we played very competitively. I thought some guys stepped up, and E's play, Marcus' play over the last couple days I think will really help us come tournament time.

COACH PERRY CLARK: We were running the play and we had some options. Biggest thing, I felt we needed to score. John had, he could have hit Marcus coming off the baseline. And he had James coming off the back side. And they really fanned out and he had a lane. I think he thought he could get E a layup. Even if we had scored then and cut it to one, we felt like at least we could pressure and maybe foul and, you know, at least have a chance. But the turnover kind of took everything that we were hoping to do away.

ELTON TYLER: (Shaking his head). I think they just outplayed us at the end of the game. They executed more. We had some letdowns on D basically.

COACH PERRY CLARK: And I know you asked the players. I think one thing that Knight does that I think -- everybody, he mesmerizes you so much with the ball. We were all trying to be conscious of his penetration, stop his penetration, that it just opens up a lot of things for other people. Because, you know, I know on the dunk we lost sight of our guy because we were watching to see if Knight was going to penetrate and if we had to come to help. He found it. Just like early in the game when we went zone, you know, he was able to find easier play guys for really good shots. Because we were just so focused on watching him, that we lost sight of our man a couple times. Great players have the ability of making other players better. I think he certainly did that for his ballclub.

COACH PERRY CLARK: Well, you know, basically, you know, when he came out, we started to get a little bit of momentum. And I just stayed with the guys that were hot and that were going. That was basically my decision.

JOHN SALMONS: I think we just gonna have to, you know, regroup and focus on our defense. I think that really hurt us today. We would've did a little better job defending, we would have been all right today. But we just didn't do that today.