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BIG TEN CONFERENCE MEN'S TOURNAMENTMarch 14, 2008Dan DakicEric GordonD.J. WhiteINDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA THE MODERATOR: We'd ask if you would make a couple of quick opening comments, then we'll take questions for D.J. and Eric and finish up with questions for yourself. COACH DAKICH: Well, that was a disappointing the way we started the basketball game. But I was proud of our team the way we competed. Hoffarber hit a tough shot, probably the toughest shot in his career, other than the one I saw on TV from his back. We didn't start the game. We didn't come to play, start the game -- had a pretty good couple days of practice, looked ready to play in shoot-around. But every -- never mind. But over the course of the last 30 minutes of the game I thought, you know, we competed, didn't make any shots, but we were competing again on the defensive end. As I said, it's probably the best we played defense all year, the last three games. They made a tough shot. But when you put yourself in the hole like that it's the uphill battle. I'm proud of the guys, I thought we had a team that battled and fought, just made a shot to beat us. THE MODERATOR: Questions for Eric or D.J., please. Q. D.J., how quickly do you try to put this loss behind you because you know there's bigger fish to fry next week? D.J. WHITE: Quick as possible. Losses like this always hurt, also -- you never forget it, especially when we want to advance and try to win this whole tourney, but there's nothing we can do now. So we just have to try to put it behind us, wait for Sunday and see what happens. Q. D.J., you missed your first three free throws. You just didn't seem like you were comfortable there all night. Can you just explain what your feeling at the line? D.J. WHITE: I just missed my first three. Hit a couple straight. Missed my last two and hit my last one. So it wasn't nothing I was feeling tonight. I feel the same way when I shoot them. They just didn't go in. But I adjusted to it. Q. Can you describe what you saw on that last play and the long basketball pass from where you were, D.J., and all? D.J. WHITE: To tell you the truth, I just remember it sailing over my head. I was guarding Coleman and he was kind of above the three-point line and it went over my head. I turned around and the shot was going in. That's all I remember about the play. ERIC GORDON: Well, I don't -- it was just a crazy catch. I saw the other three players, D.J., three players going right after the ball and it got tipped in a way and Hoffarber, he just -- he just caught it and he threw it in. Q. D.J., down seven points at halftime. Your play starting in the second half, was it something you felt like, hey, I'm the leader of this team, I need to take over and you did it in field goals and mainly at the free throw line? D.J. WHITE: We needed a boost. Once again, when we came out, we came out slow. That's something we've got to correct going into this last tournament. But, yeah, I just tried to pick my team up. We started playing. We started defending well and put the ball in the basket. At the end of the game, it just didn't go our way. Q. How much does it hurt that it especially came down to missed free throws? COACH DAKICH: It came down to a made free throw, when he made the free throw to put us up. He wasn't going to get three free throws. Q. But they were free throws that he missed? COACH DAKICH: Came down to a kid made a shot with 1.5 seconds to go. Q. But if you would have made the free throws -- COACH DAKICH: Never mind, you're right. He made the free throw when it was needed the most, with 1.5 seconds to go. Which was pretty good for him, given the fact that he missed a few before. So I understand you can go the other way with that, but you can also be kind of positive. Like, man, that's a pretty gutsy move, stepping up and knocking in a free throw when you've missed so many. And he would not have had the other ones had he made it. Q. Eric, just before D.J.'s interim heroics, on your second free throw, were you trying to miss at an angle? ERIC GORDON: Yeah, people on the team, they told me to miss and I understood that. And I know the only player that would really get it was D.J. I tried to hit it softly around the rim, and, I mean, I knew he caught it and then got an "and" one. Q. Could you talk about the lift that DeAndre gave you guys tonight? D.J. WHITE: He gave us a big lift. Coach said in the locker room he practiced well, he deserved to play good this week. So he helped us a lot in a lot of different areas. He did help us a lot. Q. Talk about what this game meant playing in Indianapolis, you played in Chicago, a Big Ten tournament, what it meant to have a lot of your fans in your house? D.J. WHITE: Means a lot to have fan support. We have one of the best fans in college basketball. They travel well, travel to see us and they're 45 minutes away from our university. So it was good to have the support tonight. THE MODERATOR: Eric and D.J., thank you for your time. We'll finish with questions for Coach Dakich, please. Q. Dan, you've had to bring -- pull this thing out, bring this team together so many times. How you do you pull it together after something like this? COACH DAKICH: I don't know. It's part of life. I thought we had a team that kind of bonded together throughout the course of the game. Truly, at the end of the day, if guys don't understand it, they've got to get ready to play for the NCAA tournament. After all, nobody should have to bring anybody together to play in that. Now, this is disappointing. It's awful. Awful for me. Awful for IU fans. Awful for the players. But you got another opportunity and kids are -- and you know this, you've dealt with it -- kids are resilient. Kids bounce back. A lot better than adults do. So we'll just meet tomorrow night, practice Sunday and get ready for whoever we play. But it's been an interesting couple of weeks, obviously. And have had a chance -- that was a real chance, I thought, tonight, to maybe do something special with this group here in this tournament, given the fact that probably, you know, it would have stole a win, I guess, for a better way to put it, based on being down five as late as we were. Q. Do you try to put this loss behind you and forget about it or do you look forward and say we can use it for motivation going into next week? COACH DAKICH: Maybe both. I mean, you can't dwell on it once you get to play your next game, obviously. But you also have to learn why you got off to a bad start, who is responsible. And then why were you able to come back. DeAndre's play, somebody mentioned that to the players. DeAndre's play was phenomenal, but it was practice. That's a hard loss. I'm not going to lie to you. That's a hard loss personally for me, given the environment, Indianapolis, the deal here. And for our players. And I again say personally for me, I'm including my feeling for the players in there, which is why I'm so defensive of our players. Somebody says, well, you lost because of free throws, meaning they blew the game. That's not what happened. So it's a hard loss, but it's part of life. And with anything you get, that happens to you that's difficult, you learn from it. Hopefully you grow from it and you get better from it. But that's what we'll try to do. But this is a tough loss. Obviously. You tell Noah about the flood, I guess, but it's a tough loss. Q. You had a couple of the same themes that you had at Penn State, struggled from the free throw line and Minnesota had 16 offensive rebounds. Can you talk about -- COACH DAKICH: We just haven't made shots. I mean, we make them pretty well in practice. I mean -- we do practice them. I mean, I'm not sure anybody shoots more, maybe Butler. But we practice and practice and practice. I think we have good shooters, I think we take good shots. The offensive rebounding, I don't know how else they scored, truthfully. I know Westbrook hit a 3 off the top of my head. I'm looking here. They've got 10 baskets. I'm thinking to myself, what did they get in transition, which wasn't much. Westbrook hit a 3. Johnson hit a couple of jump shots. I think everything else was off a loose ball or tip to lay it in. That's unfortunate, because I thought our defense was pretty good. I think it's been pretty good. But I know one time we got the ball ripped out of our hands. I don't know. Like a perfect storm of you got the lead and you don't and you have a chance to win it and you're sitting there thinking if you make one of the threes and you've got a chance. They made a great play, did a great job, Hoffarber. I'll have to watch the film. We called time out. We saw the set up. We put Ellis where we wanted him, on top of him. Drew a line, said you're here, they come off switch. My sense of it was guys got -- he got pinned in, somebody switched late. He got the ball, somebody said it was tipped. They made a great play. The kid out of bounds made a great pass. So hell of a play by them. Q. When you have a team that's shooting, as struggling from three-point range as bad as they have in the past couple of games, do you talk about it, talk to them about it in practice or do you try not to bring it up let them work that out on their own? COACH DAKICH: It's like a guy that sends you a highlight tape. And in the highlight tape he's shooting 3s, he makes 20 3s in a row, different highlights. Send you a highlight tape. You go to his stats and you say, man, he's a 40 percent shooter. So where is the highlight tape with 30 misses in a row, you know what I mean, after 20 made? That's what I've talked to them about. You're shooting 0-for-6, Eric you're 0-for-6, you're a 50 percent, good look three-point shooter. Go have a 6-for-6 night. That's how I approach it and we work hard on it. We show them film of the shots going in. We work on things -- but in truth we just haven't made shots. We thought might have been a little tired, so we cut back on practice. Went twice, didn't practice Monday. Went twice Tuesday. Once Wednesday, once Thursday. It was energetic, but just didn't make it. I'll sit here all day because I know as soon as I'm by myself it's miserable. So I'd rather talk about it. Q. Has your team gotten past what happened to Kelvin, and do they need to get past it in order to move on? COACH DAKICH: Yeah. It's one of the things I said at halftime. I said at halftime, this is -- come on, let's go here. They've been great in practice. They're fine. Much has been made about how a guy looks at me on the bench or somebody says something. All that kind of stuff. They've got to. There's no ifs, ands or buts. Because he ain't coming back. And you got -- you want to play your college season, you want to play NCAA tournament, you better be ready to play because as it looks like right now -- because my guess is we're going to play somebody really good in the first round. Sure they need to. Q. You said coming into this tournament you felt something special could happen if you could you go into the NCAA and have that same feeling, make something possibly special happen there. COACH DAKICH: What would happen if I said no, can't do it. Hell no. There ain't no -- yes, we can. I think we can go in the NCAA tournament and make something special happen. You know, that's what -- kids, like I said, to your question, Bob, kids are resilient. I'm going to go all Kiss back in the '70s, tear up the hotel room on tour probably tonight, something like that (laughing). But kids are resilient. I do two things when depression hits: One is I eat, and the other I try to make jokes, as you can't tell, so something like this, I'm going to have a freakin' half a side of beef while I'm telling Henny Youngman stories or something. Some people don't eat when they get crazy, but I eat and try to make jokes of things, if I'm not breaking stuff. Q. Coach, you've really struggled from the field shooting. You had 25 free throws of your 58 points. Do you think you can correct that within the next week and maybe get a little more field goals? COACH DAKICH: You know, I think -- I do think two things happen to win, in my opinion. You've got to play defense. When you get in the conference tournaments or NCAA tournaments, you've got to make shots. Just watch the NCAA tournament. Guys make shots. Tonight, say whatever you want about the game, we played bad to start. We played well during the middle. We competed like crazy for the first 30 minutes, blah, blah, blah, missed, made, whatever we did with free throws. You say whatever you want, that kid made the shot to win the game. He misses a shot, we win the game. I swear to you, if you watch the NCAA tournament, the two things: guarding and making shots. So for us to be a good or a viable NCAA team, we have to make shots. Usually when you're not making shots -- and this was a little bit the other day, you are taking bad ones. I didn't think we took bad ones. I thought we took pretty good shots. I thought Eric's 3s were good. I thought Armon's 3s were pretty good. Other than those two guys, we didn't really shoot any. But you gotta be able to make them. You do. You have to guard and be able to make shots. Q. Dan, how soon after the game did you know that that was the same kid who made that shot from the seat of his pants? Did you know that before? COACH DAKICH: Yeah, I knew that before the game. Bob, here's what I do. This is sad. It's tragic, really, but I get to the office at 8:00 in the morning and I watch film until practice. And then I go to practice and then I watch more and then I go home. So there isn't -- I think I know Hoffarber's life story. As Johnson's and Williams'. As everyone. I'm trying to do everything I can here to make sure these kids are in a great position, so I don't want to -- it's probably -- you're probably going to read a couple things about me this spring, a divorce, kids will leave, the whole thing. You know what I'm saying. But that's not true, by the way. My wife is standing right there. So I'm just kidding about that part of it. But you get my point. And the irony of the whole thing today truly is this: For whatever the reason, for whatever the reason, all week long, I think it was ESPN -- no, it was the Big Ten Network has been playing the 1989 Indiana versus Illinois game, like I've seen it at least twice. Well, the game Jay Edwards hits a shot over the back board from the left-hand side and Nick Anderson throws it in from half court with one second to go. I've seen that shot. Between that and watching Hoffarber the other night on TV throw one from his back, it is what it is right here today. THE MODERATOR: Thank you. End of FastScripts |
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