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NCAA MEN'S 1ST & 2ND ROUNDS REGIONALS: WASHINGTON, D.C.March 19, 2008Da'Sean ButlerBob HugginsDarris NicholsAlex RuoffJamie SmalliganWASHINGTON, D.C. Q. Have you seen Chase Budinger at all on TV or on tape and if you have, would you talk a little bit about him here? JOE ALEXANDER: I've seen him on tape a lot. He's a good player. He has a nice midrange game. He knows how to shoot the three. He's pretty athletic. Q. Wondering after the Big East tournament, what you guys have gone through, that was very physical. This is going to be a little different, just wondering what the transition is going to be like for you guys. ALEX RUOFF: Following the Big East tournament we had a few days off and a couple of great days of practice. I think body-wise we're pretty good. We're ready to get started. Q. They're not as big? ALEX RUOFF: I think playing in the Big East is going to help with the tournament. Q. Could you talk about the run you all made at the NIT last year and whether or not you think that will help in this do or die kind of situation, that you've had a lot of wins in a similar situation? JAMIE SMALLIGAN: I think so. The last time we were at the NCAA, Joe and Alex were freshmen and Darris was a sophomore, and Darris is the only guy that got some playing time. For guys like me and Da'Sean, last year was the first post season, other than the conference tournament. When it's win or go home, it's a lot different than the regular season, and I think it will help a lot tomorrow. Q. What do you know about teams that play out west in the PAC 10, the difference, the contrast with eastern teams in the Big East? Da'SEAN BUTLER: I'd say it's a lot more transition as far as they run the ball down the court a lot and they have very talented players, especially Arizona, they have a very talented team. And they do a very good job of transition and offense and scoring the basketball and numbers as far as just keep packing on the points, and keep coming at you. That's pretty much the difference I saw from let's say the Big East and PAC 10. ALEX RUOFF: Kind of the same. The transition game, some of the teams in the Big East, like Connecticut, they get out and run. They like to run a lot of pro sets, a lot of isolation sets for their two big-time players. A lot of similarities, but a couple of differences. Q. I think you hit 90-something three-pointers this year. When you get in the routine, is it different in the new offense to -- was it hard to find when your shot was appropriate over the last couple of years? And also, are you feeling, is it something you pride your game on, do you work at it extra and that sort of stuff? ALEX RUOFF: Of course I work at it, like all the players on the team. Coach Huggins has made it easy, he never told me not to shoot, he never complained about some of my shot selections. He made it easy with the new offense. I've been lucky, I guess, the hard work is paying off. Q. How much have you guys improved the last two months? In what ways the most? JOE ALEXANDER: We've made steady improvements all year. In the last two months it's been pretty much the same. We've been steadily improving every day in practice, nothing too drastic. Q. Given what Joe has managed to do in the last two or three weeks, and particularly Darris, has your game had to change because of that as far as who you get the ball to and that kind of thing? DARRIS NICHOLS: I wouldn't say it's changed. But he's kind of the focus of our offense. We're just trying to concentrate on him. And the teams have been doubling him, and you've got to make the focus on him. JAMIE SMALLIGAN: I'll agree with Darris, something in the last few years we weren't used to is to have a big guy to go down and pound it in the paint to. With Coach Huggins, that's the key to his offense, something he's had every year. Joe worked harder than anybody we ever played with. And he's working on being a reliable scorer for us. And I think on our part we've been working hard on finding good ways to get the ball without turning it over and putting Joe into the position he can score. ALEX RUOFF: Just following up, he's playing really well like now. It's well deserved for his hard work. Everybody on the team knows that. It's going to come down to us making shots. They're going to do their best to stop him on the blocks. It's going to come down on the rest of us making shots. Da'SEAN BUTLER: He said what I would say. Q. With Arizona traveling across country, and even though this is a neutral court, it's kind of in your guys' backyard, how much of a difference does it make with the game being played close to you? JOE ALEXANDER: I don't think it makes any difference, because we had to travel by bus a couple of hours. I think everybody at this point in the season is used to traveling long distances for games. I don't think it's a big difference or a big advantage. Q. Arizona has made it 24 straight years to the tournament. Do you guys find that impressive, daunting; what do you think about that? JAMIE SMALLIGAN: Yeah, obviously it's a very impressive record. I know that they lost some seniors last year and some younger guys to the draft, so I'm not sure how much experience they've got other than Chase Budinger got in the NCAA's last year. Obviously Bayless is a freshman and Hill is a sophomore that played more this year. But I think -- I don't know if that will be much of an advantage. I think someone asked earlier about the NIT, winning five games back-to-back and the last two on a neutral court, we've got enough experience to match whatever experience they have. Q. Can you talk about the challenges of playing an Arizona team at full strength when they have Nic Wise, Jordan and Jerryd and all those guys? COACH HUGGINS: We don't play anybody that's not full strength. As soon as they see us come up, I told one of your radio stations today, we're like Ernest Ainsley, we just heal everybody (laughter.) Obviously he makes them a lot better. Wise makes them a lot better because he can make shots and he runs. He gets those other guys off the ball. Q. When you were at Morgantown I think after the announcement of the seeding and everything, you talked about the successful coaches at this time of the year treating each subregional like a new tournament. Can you talk about that? COACH HUGGINS: It's no difference than your conference tournament. You try to prepare to win two games. And that's not even as much as how you go about things, how much time you spend, how much they're on their feet. How much time you spend on offense, how much time you spend on defense. Q. Can you contrast if there are any differences between Arizona or a team that plays in the Pac-10 versus what you saw every night in the Big East? COACH HUGGINS: There's 16 teams in the Big East. I think it's different in the Big East every night. Arizona is really talented. I think they've got two guys that potentially are first-round draft picks. So they're much like the upper echelon people in our league. Kevin does a great job. They're going to come out and be physical. They're going to come out and try to play man to man and take you out of things. I think when you're talking about the upper echelon people in all the really good leagues, they're all really good teams, that's why they're all ranked in the top 20 every year. Q. Just wondering, after having gone through UConn and playing Georgetown in the Big East, is this more now when you size up these teams, is it more about speed more so than their size? COACH HUGGINS: Connecticut and Georgetown was a lot about size for us. Arizona likes to get out and run. I think they're the best in transition. They're a great transition team. They probably want to play maybe a little bit faster. They probably try to spread you a little bit more and not try to pound it in quite as much because of their strength on the perimeter. Q. I was just wondering, I know you said you know the coach pretty well, I wonder if you could compare, contrast, your coaching styles. COACH HUGGINS: Kevin's and mine? Well, Kevin and I coached against each other a lot. And I think it's very similar. Kevin is going to play man to man, and he may try to trick us and throw a zone up there tomorrow. Basically he's a man-to-man guy. And his teams were always very physical. He played a lot of three out, two in. I think his, whatever, five or six or seven years in the NBA, I think he's brought a lot of the quick hitter things that they run in the NBA, a lot of buddy screening, you know, stagger screens, run a lot of things similar to when you see the Pistons play. And I think he's brought that back from an offensive standpoint. Kevin's guys have always been very physical. They've always been very tough physically and mentally. Q. It seems to me that you're kind of in a unique circumstance in that you have a great history of getting to the NCAA tournaments, West Virginia last year without you made it to the NIT and won it all. Do you get a sense that they are hungry because they weren't in the tournament last year or confident because of their success in the NIT last year or something else? COACH HUGGINS: I don't know. I'd feel really good if you'd go talk to them, because I can't figure them out. There's been days I thought we were really ready to play and we came out and didn't play. And there's been some other days I didn't think we had a chance and we came out and played really, really hard. We're like everybody else. We don't have a post guy and we don't have a whole lot of people who can break you down off the dribble, so we rely on making jump shots. And we rely almost solely offensively on jump shots, you better make them. When we don't make jump shots we're not very good. And when we make jump shots, even in the conference tournament when Joe had the big games he had, basically they were jump shots, that's kind of how the team was built on being able to make jump shots. I don't know if it has as much with anybody trying to prove anything or feeling slighted. I think it has to do with will we line up tomorrow and make open shots. Q. Do you think sort of along those same lines, do you think that the experience that they got last year in playing win or go home type games will translate to the NCAA tournament? COACH HUGGINS: The reality is how many of these guys played. There's not a whole lot of them that played, to be honest. Lost two seniors that played a lot of time and lost the one senior that they ran everything for. Joe didn't play very much at the end of the year. I think it probably helped Da'Sean a lot and Alex and Darris, but that's three guys. The majority of our team didn't play in the NIT, and the majority of our team haven't played in an NCAA tournament. We're a very young team. I don't think that had a whole lot to do with it. I think playing whatever we've played, 34 games or 35 games, whatever we played, 34 games, I guess, that we've played has a lot to do with it. And I think certainly playing in the Big East, as good as the Big East is and as much that you see, with 16 teams, you see a lot of different styles, a lot of different ways to go about doing things. I think that has a whole lot more about doing it than what happened a year ago, because the reality is most of those guys didn't play a year ago. Q. Is Ruoff about as capable a-three-point shooter and is there a green light system with him? COACH HUGGINS: Honestly, I'm pretty good about letting most guys shoot. I don't put a lot of restrictions on guys offensively, unless you start the year out 1 for 21, then I might have a talk that, You may ought to rethink it, find another way. But he's -- that's what he does. That's kind of what we do. We can't run high ball screens, screen and rolls, because we don't have those kind of players. We can't throw a close on a block, because our 7 footer is more of a three-point shooter than he is a post player. We are what we are. You try to take what you have and you try to adjust and try to put them in positions where they can be successful. Q. I know you know K.O. really well and your take on what he's gone through this year. COACH HUGGINS: We just talked in the hallway a little bit. Honestly I don't know. We haven't talked all that much. Q. You were talking about being able to adjust to different things. How much adjustment have you done in the last two or three weeks given what Joe has been able to do in the last few weeks? COACH HUGGINS: We just call his number a lot more. We didn't really run anything we hadn't run before, in all honesty, we just ran it a whole lot more. Much like what we did for Alex when Alex was making shots. When Alex was making shots early in the year we called his number a whole lot more. And then early in the year we really called Da'Sean's number a whole lot more. I like to win. The guys that are making shots, I'd just as soon they'd take more shots than the guys that aren't. 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