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NIT SEASON TIP-OFFNovember 22, 2006Mark FewJosh HeytveltJeremy PargoNEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK MARK FEW: Well, it was a great, great night for our team and our program. I mean, any time you can beat a program and a team like Carolina, that's a great thing. You know, I have the ultimate respect for them and their coach on how he does things, and so, I mean, that makes it equally special when you can beat a great coach like him and his team. So it was, I thought, for 25 to 30 minutes, we were in attack mode pretty good. Then I thought Carolina did a great job of coming at us and putting us on our heels and fortunately had a couple of guys step up and make big plays that kind of held them off and I thought that was the key to the game. Q. Josh, could you and Coach talk about what you did to slow down Tyler Hansbrough today? JOSH HEYTVELT: He just didn't even attack. Just the fact that we played such good defense on him, and, you know, got him thinking that he couldn't go to work on us in the first half kind of slowed him down. MARK FEW: That was primarily because we were doubling him hard on the catch, and we did that early in the game and so you know, that can sometimes be difficult to deal with as a post. And he's tough to stop because he runs the floor so well and plays so hard. I think as a team, we did a great job of doubling him early, and that kind of set a tone. Q. Can you talk about Matt's play, especially the first half, you got down big and he started to drive and hit open people? MARK FEW: He's a player. Matt's a player. When he's in there, usually good things happen. He's a terrific passer, one of the best probably we've ever had. But yet he can also finish. So I'm always after him to take it in there to score, not just to pass. I know he made a couple of nice drives and finished them also. He's a guy that I have the ultimate amount of confidence in and that's why he's playing a lot of minutes and you want him in at the end of those games, and also when you're having problems scoring, because he can make plays. Q. College basketball has changed, everybody knows that, but what does a Gonzaga/Butler championship matchup kind of underscore? MARK FEW: I don't know. I think if you probably look back at this, there's been all kinds of wins. At least in our case, I know our kids have played in a lot of big games and we've won a lot of big games. I think they go in expecting to win these games. I mean, that's what you want and that's why they are here and that's why they came to Gonzaga. You know, Todd does a great job at Butler, and I think they have just rolled in and just played harder and outplayed everybody thus far, at least the games I've watched. Their approach has been, looks like the same as ours. I don't know what it says. I would just say there's a lot of really good teams out there in college basketball. Q. Their tempo is quite a bit slower than yours, kind of how do you see that playing out in the championship game? MARK FEW: Well, hopefully then it played out for Tennessee today. We like to run, but I also, you know for the most part, we can execute and be effective in the half-court, too, when we're dialed in. So I think it will be the classic kind of battle of two different styles, but we've got to be able to play both. I don't think you can just run and run against a team that controls tempo like that. Q. Talk about what this means as far as the post-Morrison era about getting a win against the highest ranked team in the school's history? JEREMY PARGO: A lot of people doubt the play of Gonzaga now that Adam is gone and we've just been preparing for a moment like this, and we took advantage of it today. Q. How about your baskets, you came up with two very big baskets. JEREMY PARGO: The opportunity presented itself to get to the basketball and lay it in, so I just took advantage of it. I tried to finish up with the biggest guys on the court and I was able to do it. That's just what happened, an opportunity opened up and I took advantage of it. Q. You mentioned the double-teaming on Hansbrough, what were some other keys against Carolina tonight? MARK FEW: For the most part, I think, I haven't watched the tape but I thought we did a nice job in our transition defense. We lost Lawson right there at the end but I thought we did a pretty good job of bottling him up and keeping him out of the paint, which was a very scary aspect that I saw on film. And then we were very concerned about the glass and I think we ended up winning the boards by one, because they did a great job in the second half. But by and large I was happy with the way we competed on the glass. Q. Can you talk about the job you did on Tyler and how proud you are of it and what you did right? JOSH HEYTVELT: We came into this game knowing he's a very, very good post player and we just came in with a very good approach and doubled him very hard and didn't let him get very many open looks. I think he started shying away in the second half because we were guarding him so well and hard, if he was going to get the ball in the post that we were going to do the same thing to him. Q. Why were you able to have your players drive so effectively into Carolina's middle? Not very many people have been able to do that last year or this year. MARK FEW: I think Carolina's defense right now is pressuring very, very well out on perimeter, they are really pressuring out. So when we were effective, we were driving it in there under control and if you don't, they kind of get you back on your heels, and it's really difficult to pass guard to guard or guard to forward. We try to explain to our guys that short punches, not out-of-control ones, and that's how Derek got freed up for a couple of threes because he did a great job of punching and is finding them. Their defense is scary, when they get going like they did, they can bust you on everything you're trying to run so we just went to, dribble attack. Q. Carolina went up 10-0 at the start, talk about what changed at that point? MARK FEW: You know, I think the guys are saying we put Kuso in and Kuso made a couple plays, I think Matt made a couple nice plays on drives that got us an easy basket, you know. I think for a while, everyone was wondering if we were going to get shutout. Just getting easy baskets, get your confidence going, maybe gets their defense off you a little bit. And then we were, at least from my point of view, we were able to kind of see what was effective against their defense, so we started going more to those kind of sets and our kind of offense that is cued more into that than what we were trying early. End of FastScripts |
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