BIG EAST CONFERENCE MEN'S TOURNAMENT

March 11, 2000

Jim Calhoun

COACH CALHOUN: First thing, I'd like to congratulate St. John's. We've had some experience of winning the championship, and certainly Mike and the second year, I guess St. John's -- someone just told me, hadn't won since 1986. Clearly they deserved to win the championship and did a terrific job. Bootsy was terrific, Postell was terrific. Just bottom line I thought they were really, really good. From the Connecticut standpoint -- I'd like to extend my congratulations to them. Certainly, on a Saturday night here in New York City, it's going to be a nice special thing for them. They certainly deserve to win. They outplayed us. From our standpoint, we weren't physically tired. Mentally, we didn't do what I thought we would do. I thought for example Bootsy does shoot the ball from three. We'd given him five, six feet of cushion. Still, even to the end. We went over the top of -- we were also instead of fade cutting him, bringing him to the corner we were making him cut back to the middle. We had put in the game plan that wouldn't happen. Third, we did say the thing that would hurt you the most, couple flukey things happened with Tony, without Khalid, but still a couple things, the fast break. The weak side man must rotate back, we didn't get that and quite frankly, during the past four or five games particularly, the one thing we've done is focus in on what we need to do to win. We may not have played great, but we seem to have a much better understanding of what we need to do. I can honestly tell you tonight it appeared like Bootsy does shoot threes, we know now, after three games. They will fast break us which they did. And we did not stop them. And I'm not, you know, once again, I don't think there's any excuses. You know, they beat us, they were the better team, they've three times proven. They did that. But I felt much different about this particular game than I did the first two. The points off turnovers, 20 to 8, that's your basketball game. We kept them off the glass like we thought we would. I thought mentally we just didn't stay with what we had to do. The loss of Khalid at particular points didn't help the offense early, got us in a little bit of a hole. The bottom line is we didn't defend. At one point they were shooting 63, 64 percent. You're not going to win with a team like St. John's doing that. We always have a number up there we're ascribing to, 22, 23, 22, we erased 25 which we didn't get, 23 and 8 is our last record. We start a new season Sunday with a new schedule. Today was the last game which we're going to play, which was not going to be assigned to us starting Sunday. Season is over for us until a new season starts, which is now, the NCAA tournament, hopefully. We'll see what happens there.

COACH CALHOUN: I had a point total. Anything over 12, we needed to get him back in. You know, two of the players had freak plays. I don't agree with either of them. They are freak plays, you have to live with those. He's running up the court, kid trips, another one is going to catch a pass, guy goes over his back, official says the guy that went over his back needed a place to land. It was a little different, but it was creative anyways. It's important to be as creative as you can be in the midst of competition. But I had a point total in the first half, too, and I thought it was slipping away at eleven. I really did. I thought we got him back in, got to nine. But it did cost us one foul. In retrospect, I still maintain Tony just couldn't get by Erick, and what really stymied us in that last ten minutes of the first half was Barkley locked up Tony and Tony let himself be locked up. Second half he did a better job but that did not allow us -- we were 27-24, did not allow us to stay real close in touch. I give Erick a great deal of credit for doing that. Next time Tony faces as good a guy as Erick defensively, I'm sure he'll go by him. Thank you.

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