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NCAA MEN'S 3RD & 4TH ROUND REGIONALS: ST. LOUISMarch 23, 2007Aaron BrooksErnie KentTajuan PorterBryce TaylorST. LOUIS, MISSOURI MODERATOR: Victorious Oregon Ducks are with us. We'll start off with a statement on the game by head coach Ernie Kent and then we'll have the three student athletes. Coach Kent, when you're ready. COACH KENT: What a great college basketball team. Obviously UNLV is a very good basketball program. And we have the utmost respect for them coming into the game and wanted to give them our best effort, and this team did a tremendous job defensively. I continue to hear comments about our defense I think that's the fifth opponent out of seven games we held under 40%, and we did a great job at that at the end of floor. Offensively we've never been a team that's gone into ball control. And it's a little bit our fault, being too conservative there. We need to attack until the last minute of the game the way this team plays and everything. Just keep the pressure on our opponents. But they did a nice job of hitting some big shots and working themselves back into the game and fortunately we did a good job closing it off. We move on to the Elite 8 now. Q. Tajuan, if you could talk about your shooting tonight. Obviously you were kind of feeling it, weren't you? TAJUAN PORTER: Yes, I just came out with a lot of confidence, tried to take good shots and knock them down. Q. At 5-6, 160, what do you bring to the court that makes up for some of that? TAJUAN PORTER: My energy. I try to disrupt the game as much as I can. You know, being small you can't be a liability on defense. So you just try to -- you just gotta disrupt the game as much as you can and keep the defense off balance. Q. Tajuan, was the shooting in the dome ever an issue for you? I think this is the first time you guys have played in a dome. Was that an easy adjustment? TAJUAN PORTER: No, a shooter is a shooter. It's a rim and a ball. I just took good shots and I'm confident in my shots and my abilities and I was able to knock them down today. Q. Aaron, can you talk about your back court mate there a little bit. Do you sense something -- do you see something in his eyes when he gets going like that? Because you guys had a tough time shooting, you two. Do you see something in Tajuan's eyes and you know that he's going to be shooting like that? AARON BROOKS: Well, you get the feeling that he was feeling good. He was dynamite today. I think he seen that we was all struggling a little bit on the offensive side, that's what a good point of ours can do, they can pick their teammates up. And he's been doing it all year. Not surprising to me and it was fun to watch. I was glad I had a front-row seat to watch it. I had the best seat in the house. And it was just amazing. You can't do nothing but be happy for him. Q. Tajuan, yesterday you had the little bandage on your right hand, you said you had a little bit of pain. And looked like you turned an ankle on the second half. How are the ankle and the hand? TAJUAN PORTER: The hand is fine. I just put the tape on the finger or the thumb in practice just for precaution reasons, I didn't want to reinjure it. So in the game I wasn't worried about it. I tweaked my ankle a little bit. It's okay. I just came down wrong. Q. Do all three of you -- or just Aaron and Bryce for this one. Defensively tonight what did you feel the key was? Just basically defending their perimeter guys I think they were 9 of 33 on the perimeter, but your two front court guys got double-figure rebounds. What was the most important in your eyes? BRYCE TAYLOR: Just making sure we contested all their shots, made them work for it. Just made sure we tried to help each other out and have good rotations. We had some breakdowns here and there but overall our main key was just to shut down the perimeter and then try to limit Wendell White. We tried to limit him because he was coming in their leading scorer. We just tried to work together and tried to help each other out. AARON BROOKS: We just tried to stop their transition. Just like us, they like to run and gun. We had to get back in transition and stop their initial offense. And I think once we did that it made it harder. We kind of locked up their sets a little bit. And we just locked up their transition and put shot pressure on their shooters. And it's hard to shoot when you've got hands in your face, unless you're Tajuan Porter. Q. Were you guys surprised it did get a little too close for comfort at the end? Did you relax when you were way up? BRYCE TAYLOR: I would say that's probably what we're most disappointed about because we're a much better team than showing down that stretch. As Coach said, we're not a ball control team. We got a bit tentative and careless with the ball. We have to make sure we keep our composure down the stretch of the games and everybody has to want the ball in those situations. It's one of those things I feel I need to get better. Everyone has to take a little fault in that we need to make sure we step up in those crunch-time situations and don't relax even though we're up 18 points, because shooting the ball the way they shoot it, they can come back in a hurry. AARON BROOKS: I think we'll be fine. I think we had some bad passes and stuff like that. But that's not characteristic of us. So I think we'll be fine. I think we got everybody can handle the ball and stuff like that. I think we just had a couple bad plays and it kind of built on each other. But we'll be all right. I think it's just one of them days when things happen and ball slips and all that. But I don't think it will happen again though. Q. Looking ahead to Florida, the defending champs this weekend, how do you use your experience against Georgetown which is another huge team? How is your defensive scheme going to contain the big boys down low? BRYCE TAYLOR: Just we gotta make sure, make it as tough as possible. Just try to not let them get easy touches down low. Blocking guys is going to be very important and try and tire them out by running up and down and trying to transition as quickly as possible. Besides that, we just gotta -- I'm sure our coaches will watch a lot of film and get ready for whatever our game plan is going to be. Q. Aaron, just one simple word, describe Porter tonight. In just one word? AARON BROOKS: I don't know. (Laughter) Fearless. Fearless. Or big. I can give you a couple more. Q. Aaron, could you talk about what you've seen from Florida. Now you're one game away from the Final Four. You have to go through the defending national champions, what have you seen from their team, what impresses you about them? AARON BROOKS: They're an experienced team. I don't think anything shocks them. They don't play it against every team possible every offensive set, they've been around for a while now and they got the experience. They play hard. They have shot blockers in the middle. That's impressive. But the fact that they've been here before and they played before and they play hard. And I think that's probably the things that impress me the most. Q. Coach, I know you've got to be happy with the victory, but also 17 turnovers and you lost 16 points off your lead. Can you correct this with strategy, or is it more a mental toughness focus kind of thing? COACH KENT: Well, I think it's more of a mental toughness, focus kind of thing. I thought it got away from us a little bit there. We had to fight through a couple tough calls and we just started throwing the ball away a little bit. We talked about it in the locker room just now, you cannot be satisfied with that. This team has been through so much over the course of the last season that we're not satisfied with the way we played and the way we closed out that game. So it is a win for sure, but we're going to have to play better on Sunday. We have to take care of the basketball. We need to stay in attack mode more for us. We're not a team that's going to pull it out and hold it out. We need to stay attacking and moving the ball up and down and using our skill particularly when teams pressure you. When teams pressured us in the past it's opened up the flood gate for us to go score the basketball, and I felt like we got away from that. Q. Coach, you've had tremendous success during the course of the season, but to have a player go off like Porter went off tonight, what was going through your mind as you were watching him in that first half, 17 straight points? COACH KENT: I understand starting the year he went 28, 38. He had a game with 10 threes and I took him out of the game. He was upset. He said he wanted to go for 50. I told him he needs to sit down because he had already broken Ronnie Lee's record and was coming up on Greg Bowers' record, a good friend, I couldn't let him do that, so we had to sit him down. We have seen him play like that before early on and nothing really goes through your mind because he's just a terrific little ball player. Special type of player. And I'm just thankful that we had enough common sense in ourselves and we saw him early on to recruit him, because we thought he was going to be a special, unique player at this level. And he sure has not disappointed us at all. Q. You mentioned about recruiting him. Do you remember when the first time you saw him when you saw a 5-6 kid, did you have any hesitation? COACH KENT: Not at all. I've been a guy that I've loved little point guards. I know coaches stay away from them because they think they're a defensive liability. My thing is if you can be a pest, you can disrupt the flow of the game on the defensive end. He's come a long way with his defense. When I saw him in the gym you saw a guy who could shoot it lights out. Not just shoot it, he understood how to play the game, get floaters off jump shots, deep 3s, didn't matter where he was or who was on him. He could pull it and shoot the ball. He put one of the amazing displays I've ever seen during the summer down in Vegas against the toughest competition in the country. We knew we had a special unique little player if we could get him to understand the defensive end of the floor. So the thing about him is whatever liability is on the defensive end of the floor, you do have to come and guard him at the other end. He's pretty good down there. Q. What are your early thoughts about having to play Florida now and what impresses you the most about them? COACH KENT: They're a complete basketball team. They're well coached. They're experienced. They've got size inside. Their big guys can score. There are skilled, big men in there. They're tough in there. Their guards are really, really good. They have a bench. They have everything you need to be a national champion, which is why they did it last year. And, you know, they're right there to go do it again this year. So we're going to have to play extremely, extremely well to win that ball game and we're well aware of that, too. Q. What you do you chalk up Bryce's struggles today? COACH KENT: It's hard to say. We talked about that in the locker room. I think he's the type of kid just like Aaron Brooks. I thought he struggled a little bit in the game. They're the type of kids that will bounce back and play better the next time out. So there's no reason for it at all. I mean, we played a lot of basketball games. Not going to be perfect every night. Our job is to put our arm around them and love them and get them ready for Sunday. Q. You were able to shut down two of UNLV's best players, Wink Adams and Wendell White. Seems nobody this entire season has been able to shut down both at the same time. How were you able to accomplish that? COACH KENT: We talked about they had three terrific scorers, and if we could neutralize two of them and do the job on the rest of the people on the floor and the bench, one guy could have a good game in that, and I thought we did a good job of that. And the key focus for us was to shut down the transition and shot pressure the basketball and try to take the three-point shot out of their arsenal. And I thought we did a pretty good job of that until late in the game when they took some tough shots. And really when they started taking some of the tougher shots it gave us a chance to get out and run in transition. So this team is a very good defensive team. They've been really good the last nine ball games now, and particularly five out of the last seven they've been very, very good with rotating and doing a good job of executing game plans. They're both terrific players. And they just force you to work every possession to really be conscious of where they are at on the floor at all times. Q. Ernie, why do you suppose people are still questioning your defense? COACH KENT: Well, I think our reputation is one that -- you know, I heard John Calipari talk about this about people think we run up and down the floor and run and gun. And we don't. We have 20 something different offensive sets. There's a method to our madness. We know what we're doing. It may look like run and gun but it's a little more complicated than that. So I think people see us shoot the ball so much and we begin such an offensive team and offensive rhythm, if you don't defend, you can't get on the run. It's hard to run when teams are scoring the ball on you because they can get back in transition by the time you get it out of bounds. But if you can get teams to miss you can get up the floor and run. So if our offense is clicking, then our defense is doing a good job. MODERATOR: Thank you. End of FastScripts |
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