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BIG EAST CONFERENCE MEN'S TOURNAMENT

March 13, 2008

Jim Calhoun

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK

COACH CALHOUN: Some games are very complex. You mull over them, why you won or why you lost, and it's difficult. This one's very easy. They came out, and they kicked our butt and they outworked us and won the game. We had physical mismatches, which we never took advantage of inside. 42-26 on the glass, especially when we were coming back, we couldn't get any defensive rebounds to get ourselves going. And we were unwilling for 40 minutes to put the kind of effort you need into a tournament game.
Simple. Case closed. We go home.
THE MODERATOR: Questions, please.
COACH CALHOUN: By the way, I should say that Alexander, he is a terrific player. He'd be a lot better player if he didn't touch the ball as many times. Because our kids feel after he gets it, they were going to stop him. And when he got somewhere around 27 or 28, I thought it would be a good idea if he realized -- by the way, he had 32 the first time. Before they realized he was a good basketball player.
He played terrific today. But my team was not very good today. And we didn't compete the way we need to compete to get 24 wins. It's more than disappointing this time of the year that you won't compete in Madison Square Garden the way we didn't compete.

Q. What can you take out of this?
COACH CALHOUN: I take nothing out of it.

Q. Going into the NCAA Tournament?
COACH CALHOUN: I take nothing out of it. A lot of worry.

Q. What things can you improve on in specific?
COACH CALHOUN: Competing. I'm not trying to be a jerk to you. I know you're trying to ask a question. But to take something out of a game like this where we had mismatches. Ruoff gets the second foul. We don't use him, so we go zone. Then we run at Mazzulla, who doesn't take threes, and leaves Nichols alone. We know they're going to run that play. In the beginning of the second half we tell them at halftime, you're going to get picked at the top. I'll give you a list. I'll take away all the things that we didn't do that we told the kids to do. It's not the kids' fault, it's the coach's fault because the kids didn't listen to us.
Bottom line I take nothing out of this game except for the fact that we didn't compete the way we should have competed to win a game like that.

Q. Are you concerned about your post play going forward?
COACH CALHOUN: Before this game, we had one of the best shot blockers in the country. We played a team that put five out. Thabeet's a good player. He'll be making more money than probably most everybody in this room. That's a hard game to play in because they play five out.
But am I concerned about Hasheem? I'm concerned that he played awful today and he looked tired for the first time all year, and the fact that Jeff had a bad game offensively and defensively. Rebounding, particularly, the two of them, where we had our butts handed to us, where I thought we had advantages in there.
But if you put everything in one game, I'll put it in the 45, 48-point win against Cincinnati. Put everything in that game, then we're wonderful. If I put everything in this game, we're quite frankly not very good. Not very good at all. So I can't do that, no.
But bottom line, that's not my concern now. My concern is our focus on how important was it to win here in the neighborhood, in the Big East, in Madison Square Garden, and just apparently it was a lot more important for West Virginia to work harder. That's what I'm concerned about. And the NCAA's, there's a lot hanging out there for a lot of us. If you don't want to compete there, that I'd be much more concerned about than any individual aspect of our game.

Q. Is Alexander a particularly tough match-up for your team specifically or is he tough for anybody to beat?
COACH CALHOUN: He's averaging 28.8 coming into this game. So that makes it 29 against the last five opponents he's played. So one would have to presuppose that he's a tough match-up for everybody. He's probably one of the best players in the league, clearly.
The way to play him is not to allow him to get the ball. One guy did, that was No. 11. But he after awhile got oversized. We were supposed to get a rotation down from our post, but like a lot of the other things we did, we expected Hasheem to do that, but he didn't do it. Then we started making subs, we didn't do that. And we wanted to double him when he got the ball in the low post. Once again, there wasn't many things that we planned to do that we did do.

Q. You had a really good run late in this season, then you lost a game and you were disappointed in the way they played then. Now you're very disappointed in how they play today. Going into a NCAA Tournament, would you say this is the most confused or less handle you have on a team going in?
COACH CALHOUN: I really don't know about that one. Rollie Massimino in 1984 when he lost by 30-something points, and the next game was, I believe, the NCAA Tournament. He went on to win six games and win a national championship. I think he probably was a little confused that night about going into a tournament.
I know the night that Steve Lappas and Villanova beat us, and I happened to see Steve who is a very good friend, talking how high he was going into the tournament; they lost that Tuesday to Virginia Commonwealth, and we went to the final eight that year. My point being simply that to take any single game as a barometer, and for me to take our team when we do practice again and try to take this one game, I think we won 13 of our last 16, something like that. That's a pretty good closing for a season.
But I am incredibly disappointed here because with the aspects of the game, they were always bottoming. The number one aspect that always bothered me, when we don't give it everything we have and leave it on the floor, and Ruoff makes faraway threes, which I've seen him do before. Yes, Alexander put a good performance on, certainly, but that game was very winnable inside for us. It wasn't just the guards' fault. Our big guys who never presented themselves to throw the ball into the post.
So, yeah, I have concerns, which we'll address. But how do you figure how poorly we played at Providence, come back and we were ahead of a team, not a bad team, by the way, 36-5. So I don't know if it's a handle. When you win ten in a row, you say you don't have a handle on your team, it would be hard to say that, it really would be.
But there have been a couple of times this year that we've done some unexplainable things in a 32-game schedule. And this one, the Providence game in particularly. The first Providence game they just shot lights out from three. Made 14 out of 22 threes. That happens to teams. It happened today in the Villanova-Georgetown game. They start making threes and continue to make threes, even without their big guys. Those things happen. What I didn't like, that game, when we weren't scoring, they weren't either. But we weren't getting rebounds to give ourselves opportunities. Now the shot, the clock, we're down for about 10 most of that period of time, 9, we were not scoring. Then we gave them two and three possessions at a time because they just kicked our butt on the boards. That concerns me greatly, and hopefully we'll be able to do something about it by the time we play again.

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