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NIT SEASON TIP-OFFNovember 21, 2007Jon BrockmanLorenzo RomarJoe WolfingerNEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK THE MODERATOR: Questions, please? Q. Can you talk about the way they defended you in the second half? JON BROCKMAN: I think they did a little bit better job of making contact in the post and then bringing in that second guy on the double, and also just as a team I think they did a better job of picking us up in transition and cutting that off. Q. Was that Jones doing that, or was that them as a whole doing it? JON BROCKMAN: It was pretty much them as a whole. They really sent people through and had a couple different guys coming at us. Q. Jon, you were out-rebounded by nine. Does that surprise you? JON BROCKMAN: I feel like we could have rebounded a lot better than we did. They are a great rebounding team. They're big bodies, and a lot of times when big bodies shoot around the hoop, you know, their arms aren't that far from the hoop so they just get it right back. But we definitely could have done a lot better job cleaning up the glass. Q. Did you guys do anything different in the last seven minutes? You hit the three to put you within one and then didn't hit a field goal until three minutes left. Just missing shots, or what happened during that little run they had when they sort of took control of the game? JOE WOLFINGER: I had a couple of open shoots but they didn't go in. If we would have had our original three-point shooter, Appleby, the game would have been a lot different. LORENZO ROMAR: We played against a very good basketball team. Going into the ballgame we knew that they were going to be strong and physical underneath. I thought that our big guys and our defense did a pretty good job on their bigs in terms of them scoring points, even though Jones had a good game. But where they killed us was on the boards. The offensive glass, they had 12 offensive rebounds in the first half, and we were up four. We knew if we couldn't do a better job than that on the glass, it was going to be a long night. They got seven more in the second half. Dominique Kirk I think was the difference in this ballgame. He was a senior, he controlled the basketball game from the guard position. He's been a four-year starter for them, and it really showed tonight. He directed their team, he scored when he had to, he got the ball inside when he had to. He spearheaded their defense, and they did a good job in the second half of really guarding us. We went inside to Jonny (Jon Brockman) and he scored and he got some blocked, then we began to miss from the perimeter, and we came up short. That's a good basketball team. Q. How much does it hurt not having Appleby in a game like this as your players were saying? LORENZO ROMAR: Well, we didn't have Appleby in the first half and we were up four. Does he help? Yeah, any time you're playing without one of your starters, your top scorers, it hurts. We've got to play games. We can't say Friday we're not going to play because we don't have Appleby. We've got to show up and play. Q. Are you encouraged by this or disappointed by what you saw today? Did you like the first half and not the second? LORENZO ROMAR: Well, disappointed because we lost. Whenever you lose you can point to areas where you could have done a better job. We could have controlled their guards better. Sloan got loose on us. We did a good job on Josh Carter. We were very concerned about him. Obviously the rebounding was disappointing, that we didn't do a better job. But we do remember that first half and parts of the second half we're encouraged -- they did a good job guarding us. If we could have knocked some shots down at a couple crucial times, maybe the outcome would have been different. But I don't look at this game as, what are we going to do, we're never going to win another game. I think we did some positive things, also. Q. Just to elaborate on what you just said, you went from shooting 53 percent in the first half to 26 in the second, attribute that to their defense stepping up or just missing open looks? LORENZO ROMAR: I think their defense did a better job. I think they started to double Jon. They started to pay attention to Jon Brockman. He still scored, but I don't know if it was at the rate that he was scoring in the first half. They kind of made everyone else beat us. Quincy Pondexter played ten minutes. A guy like that can take the pressure off Jon if he gets going. So we didn't have him, but that's part of the game. Q. Why are they so good on the glass do you think? LORENZO ROMAR: Well, first of all, if you've ever seen the movie Space Jam, all those big people out there, they're huge. Q. They play a lot of three guards, though. LORENZO ROMAR: Yeah, but most of the time they've got two giants in there. When they go, they go. There are other teams that have tall players that don't rebound worth beans, but these guys have an identity, and they attack the glass, the big guys. You get Bryan Davis, big guy, six rebounds, three offensive rebounds. Joseph Jones only there six and DeAndre Jordan ten, and Josh Carter is their front-line guy, he had seven. There's their front line. Sloan got some rebounds in there, but they were relentless out there on the boards. You really have to root them out, you just can't turn and box them out because they reach right over you, they're so long, especially DeAndre. End of FastScripts |
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