NCAA MEN'S FINAL FOUR

March 29, 1996

Rick Pitino

COACH PITINO: We're very excited to be here in New Jersey. Obviously every team starts out the beginning of the year hoping and playing and dreaming that you can get to this point. And we realize that we're going to have to play a great basketball game to win, but I think our team is capable of doing that.

COACH PITINO: I think typical of a second game in the season the difficulty I had early on was trying to find out who would mesh the best together, which units. I made up my mind early on we were going to play it like a professional team with two units. And I had to find out who the point guard was going to be, who the two guard was going to be, and how they interact with each other. We won our first two exhibition games by a substantial margin, everything seemed fine. Then we played against Maryland and got down big in the game. It was obvious we were not playing the right people together. And we made a change, we put Anthony Epps to one, and we let Tony Delk concentrate on scoring. And now it's been a great situation as far as the cohesiveness of the basketball team and that's where we've evolved.

COACH PITINO: We don't talk about it at all. Players get complimentary tickets for family members. Students have to have vouchers to get in. We don't talk about it at all really.

COACH PITINO: I've always had good depth because of the way we play, you have to have good depth. But since I've been a coach I've played ten players. But I've never had ten players so close in ability. And it's not unusual for the -- when we scrimmage and go through game like situations for the second unit to beat the first unit. The major difference is that the power forward spot, Antoine Walker, the backup power forward on the white team is a freshman, and outside of that it's very close.

COACH PITINO: Actually they didn't handle the press well the first time around. They had 23 turnovers. But that was the weakness that they had in that game. But today if you look at the difference back then to today, they just handled Arkansas's press and Georgetown's press very well. And that's how they have evolved, because of handling the pressure. The reason they beat us that night, besides being better than us was that Dingle, Bright and Camby had great nights, and Marcus Camby -- I really thought we didn't do a good job on him. I've watched the film three times. We did a good job, but he's a great basketball player.

COACH PITINO: I think that's somewhat true, but I think this Final Four does not indicate that. Because you have the -- when you look at Massachusetts, they've been the most dominating team in college basketball the past two years consistently, inside and outside their league. And now they have the player of the year in the country of Marcus Camby. I don't know if he's No. 1 pick, but certainly one or two. We have two seniors, maybe three, two in the first round, maybe one in the second round. Erick Dampier would be a lottery pick. I'm sure Richard doesn't want him to come out. Dontae' Jones could be a lottery pick. And then then you have John Wallace who waited for this moment. You have the star qualities. You have the star teams. Now, it could have worked otherwise, where that wouldn't be the case. But I think John Wallace, it's great to see him not only get so much better on the perimeter, but get his just reward by staying in school. And it definitely helped him. And he made the statement back, I remember when it happened, look, I haven't had money all my life, one more year won't matter. And what it's done for him in the long run is make him more money, because he enhanced his game.

COACH PITINO: Well, the thing about Massachusetts that you cannot do and that we did with say Duncan is he's such a quick passer, hitting Dingle and Bright driving and if you play hard he'll step away and take you one-on-one. And the other thing you can't do is if you concentrate so much on Camby they'll cut you to pieces with their other players. Because this is truly a great team. No matter what coach you go back to Vince Lombardi and take some of the best coaches in the game, and if you ask them to give you a definition of team, as far as understanding roles, as far as defense, as far as togetherness, as far as all the attributes you would say a great team would have, you can kind of use Massachusetts as an example of that word.

COACH PITINO: We tried. We tried to get them to play our style and they played it and scored 92 points. I think their lack of depth is a strength rather than a weakness because they keep Padilla and Travieso on the court, Bright and Dingle and Weeks and Camby all the time. And they're great together. If they had to go to 8, 9 and 10, obviously they would lose a lot. We hope we could get them to have to do that. But so far in two years not many teams have been able to do that.

COACH PITINO: I just don't think you can hide from it. I've been asked this question a hundred times about the pressure of that. Kentucky has five championships, four in the late '40s and mid-'40s and early '50s. And the people love basketball so much that they're starving for another championship. And I told the players that you can't say there's no pressure. You have it. I have it. But we can make it good pressure, pressure that makes you focus better, play better defense, rebound better, run faster, jump higher. And there is pressure in all our jobs. And if you could turn it into good pressure, pressure that wants to make you excel and be the best you can be, then it's something you live with that's good. If you're worried about it, if you have fear of failure, if it gets you nervous it's bad pressure and you're not prepared. We've been fortunate, we're having a lot of fun. We've had fun from day one. We had fun after losses. We've learned from our losses to become better. So it's been good.

COACH PITINO: Well, both players are capable of having big nights. I've watched both players get better with each year. Dingle is a great passer off the dribble. Bright is the king of the baseline. Both players will head to the baseline, come from behind the backboard to offensive rebound, they're a professional offensive rebound team. It's like having two or three Dennis Rodmans on the floor. It's an offense unto itself on the offense treatment. They stand about eight feet from the basket, they wait for penetration, and in one step they're at the rim.

COACH PITINO: You know, I think that -- I read the precious present to every basketball team that I coach. And what I just want them to do is -- this is wonderful. This is a wonderful experience. Have fun while you're here. I know they're going to give a hundred percent tomorrow. I know they're going to do everything they can to beat Massachusetts. But I don't want them to be uptight the whole way. Looking back on it, Tom Osborne, who I think is someone who waited very patiently for his team to win the championships, and I think after all that time if you look back on it, if he was uptight and didn't enjoy all those teams, would it have been worthwhile for the two years he did win. And probably he would say no. You don't know if it's ever going to happen, a championship. It may happen, it may not. So you have to enjoy what you have when you have it. And that's what we're trying to do. We realize that we're going to have to play a great basketball game tomorrow to get a victory. And if we do it, we'll be very excited to be in the finals. If we don't do it, we'll try our damnedest to do it next year.