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NIT SEASON TIP-OFFNovember 21, 2007Dominique KirkDonald SloanMark TurgeonNEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK THE MODERATOR: Coach, if you want to make an opening comment and we'll take questions for the players. MARK TURGEON: Obviously I'm happy with the outcome. You know, we were scared to death at the beginning of the game. We were turning the ball over, not defending, not executing. We weren't doing anything right. I think we got down eight, maybe ten. And I tried to jar them in the first time-out and scream and yell at them and that didn't work, trying to instill fear and confidence and finally settled down. I thought the whole key was we started to take away their transition points, second-chance points, and kept them off the foul line at the start of the second half. So I was pleased. And I thought down the stretch Joe Jones just did an unbelievable job on Brockman, who's a big-time player, and just did what we had to do. We make it hard on ourselves. We missed a lot of free throws and we had a lot of turnovers but we were still good enough to overcome it. Q. Did you feel fortunate to be down by 4 at the half? MARK TURGEON: I didn't say I felt good. I didn't want the guys to feel satisfied being down four. I wanted them to be angry with the way they played. But in the back of my mind, to look up, 12 turnovers, they shot 53 percent to our 39 percent, and I don't know how many fast breaks we had, numbers, didn't score, and they came down the other way, and those are momentum changers. Yeah, to be down 4 was pretty good for us. Q. Can you talk about playing in this building? Was that part of the nerves early? DOMINIQUE KIRK: Yes, I think the nerves of the building, but I think like Coach said, we settled down. We went out there and just started executing our stuff, and Joe did a real good job on Brockman, and we went out there and played hard in the second half. Q. Did the quickness bother you guys at the start? DOMINIQUE KIRK: You know, they're very quick. They gave us a fit, a transition in the first half. We went out there, and Coach adjusted. He sent two back. Usually we only send one back, so he made an adjustment, and it slowed it down a little bit. Q. Donald, the first couple games the shot wasn't falling. How good did that first three feel? DONALD SLOAN: Well, I really just give all the credit to my teammates, because, as you said, first four games, I counted, 0 for 20. So that made more pressure on them and less pressure on me because people think, well, he hasn't hit a shot yet. I felt like after I hit the first one, it was time to play then. But I really just had in the mindset, from my hitting them, just when I hit one, okay, just keep playing to get out of the slump that I was in. I'm glad he just kept me in basically. MARK TURGEON: It was hard (laughter). Q. Dominique, what did they do to Carter? He didn't have many openings or didn't get in the flow much. What happened to him? DOMINIQUE KIRK: Well, Josh, I think he had some open shots in the second half, he just didn't follow his weight sometimes. But usually Josh always hits it. Josh, last year he was a three-point -- the most three-point -- the best (laughter). He had open looks. They didn't fall his way tonight, but we're going to keep giving them to him, he's going to keep taking them, and eventually they're going to go in. Q. Do you think you can shoot this poorly Friday night and beat Ohio State or Syracuse? MARK TURGEON: I don't know. This will be my first look. I never look ahead so I never watch film on any of the teams. I don't know what we ended up from the foul line, but we've been shooting from from the foul line all year. I'm trying not to make a big deal of it. We have good foul shooters. We're making them in practice, everybody but DeAndre. Everybody is making them in practice, and eventually it's going to carry over to the game. We'll see, maybe we'll make every one of them tomorrow night. Q. What did Joseph Jones do to Brockman defensively? MARK TURGEON: Just played before he caught it. He had Junior and DeAndre on him most of the night. DeAndre is a freshman. He used his length and gave Brockman some problems. Joe just made -- he played before he caught it. He was in position before he saw the play coming. They run the back-in plays and Joe is a smart player. I waited as long as I could to put Joe on. I had in my mindset I wasn't going to put him on until the last eight minutes of the game, and we did it. He went back in at the eight-minute time-out, or right before, and he guarded Brockman the rest of the way and did a fantastic job. Q. Were you worried about him fouling out? MARK TURGEON: Yeah, I was worried. I didn't mind DeAndre picking up fouls or Junior, but Joe is too important to us. Q. Besides that switch on defense you held them without a field goal from the 17-minute mark down to about 40 left. Anything you did defensively, or what was the difference in that run? MARK TURGEON: I think it was two things. I thought we guarded pretty well, I think they got tired. I think they missed shots. I don't know if they got tired, they missed shots. They had some open looks that they missed. But we locked in. Our identity is defense. The previous staff built this program on defense, and we're trying to continue that. At times we didn't look that way. At times we're trying to be a little more versatile offensively, but our identity is our defense, and we did that in the second half. Q. It sounded like you did a nice job on the boards. It seemed like you got after it pretty good. MARK TURGEON: Do they have stats yet? Yeah, we're big. I'm in there talking all the time about rebounding. It's very important to me, free throw shooting and rebounding. We've got one of them working. I was scared to death because Washington was averaging 16 rebounding points a game coming into this. It was one of our keys. We have three keys every game, and in the second half we did all three of them, and one was definitely rebounding. I haven't seen the numbers. One of them was eight at halftime, and they got a few rebounds at the start of the second half and after that I thought we dominated the boards. Q. When you came in, is what you have, five games in, what you thought you had? MARK TURGEON: Yeah, because I recruited a lot of these kids out of high school. I recruited Texas, and if I couldn't get involved with them, I at least watched them and knew them. So I knew we were going to have struggles on offense early. But I knew we'd be big. I knew we had a chance to guard. So, yeah, it's about what I thought. I thought we might be a little bit better offensively, but we've struggled a little bit with that, shot 43 percent for the game. But we'll get better. The thing that's encouraging for me, people don't understand, we're ranked so high, I don't know, it's just because of what we've done in the past, but we're a young basketball team, play a lot of sophomores and some freshmen, and Washington was a young team, too, but we've got some growing up to do, which is encouraging. I think we're going to be a lot better three months from now than we are right now. End of FastScripts |
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