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NCAA MEN'S 1ST & 2ND ROUNDS REGIONALS: ANAHEIMMarch 20, 2008Josh CarterBryan DavisJoseph JonesDominique KirkMark TurgeonANAHEIM, CALIFORNIA THE MODERATOR: Again, we'll open up with a statement from Coach, then open it up to questions for the student athletes. Coach, whenever you're ready. COACH TURGEON: That was a great win for us. We beat a really, really good BYU team. I think they won 13 out of 14 coming into this game. And, you know, about the ten-minute mark they took a two-point lead and I was a little worried. We were confused defensively. We weren't making open shots, but we just kept guarding. I thought defensively the last eight minutes of the game we were really good. We gave up two threes. Dominique helped off of a 45, shouldn't have done it. Then Sloan who hasn't practiced with us helped off and Fredette hit a three. Besides that we were great defensively and we rebounded. We really rebounded the second half. We boxed out. Our guards helped us rebound. Offensively we were as good as we've been in a long time executing. We really executed, executed, executed. They went box-and-one on us one possession; we got a three for Dominique. We ran our plays. We got the ball into the post. The guys set good screens and we finished. Made a few adjustments at half-time to get the ball a little deeper in the post, and just executed at a high level. I thought Beau made a good decision not to shoot the ball in the corner, penetrated, and he got the ball to Dominique who hit two big threes for us like he's done his whole career, just guarded well. So a great win. I'm really, really proud of our guys. Q. I'll direct this one to you, Josh. How good did it feel to get out there and hit three three-pointers to start it out and get nine points in that early 11-0 run? JOSH CARTER: I felt great. My teammates kept telling me all week to just keep shooting and it would begin to fall for you, and it was great to be able to get off to a great start. Q. Bryan and Joe, could both of you guys talk about their big guys in the middle and how you had to guard them better in the second half, and both -- just the whole battle inside? JOSEPH JONES: Their big guy, Trent Plaisted is a very good player. Coach told us just do the best job we can. Just try to keep him away from the basket and just play defense on him. We knew he didn't want our guards to run down and give up a three-point shot. The game was on the big men. We got four big men, and we were just going to keep coming at him and just try to do the best job we could. BRYAN DAVIS: He just told us, "Let the bigs beat us, and make sure the guards stayed out on the perimeter and don't sink in," and that helped to our advantage today. Q. Josh, did you feel like you were being guarded the same way today as you had been like in the Big 12? Like you kept talking about being fronted a lot this year. JOSH CARTER: At the beginning, no. I got three wide open looks. But after I knocked those three down, they started facing up on me a little bit more. So early they didn't guard me, then they started guarding me just like everybody else. Q. Dominique, could you talk a little bit about your two threes down the stretch. You hadn't shot a whole lot during the game but you got those. DOMINIQUE KIRK: At the beginning I really couldn't knock down shots, whatever. And, you know, my teammates just told me keep shooting it's going to fall for us, and, you know, just going out there and just believing in it and just hitting them two threes and it just felt good. Q. Joseph, you led your team with 12 rebounds. Half the rebounds were about equal between the teams, but then you guys got a lot more the second half. Did anything change? JOSEPH JONES: Not really changed. We just wanted to start going and get the ball. We feel like we needed to get some second chance points and just dominate the boards. That's been one of our goals this whole season, dominate the boards, box out and just keep rebounding and it did a great job for us. Once you get them stopped from getting rebounds, you got a good chance of winning. Q. Josh, off-and-on year, probably frustrating at times. Does it all feel better now with this performance? JOSH CARTER: It feels good to have a good performance. But, I mean, we didn't come here to just win one game. We just want to keep it rolling, and whoever we get tomorrow we're going to play hard, and we just want to keep doing it, keep winning. Q. Josh, can you talk about -- you said you didn't come here to win one game. If UCLA wins that next game, obviously that's going to be a pretty tough match-up. You guys played them last year. Can you talk about the team this year with the addition of Kevin Love, how tough that match-up makes them? JOSH CARTER: Well, I've watched him on TV all year and they're great team. I mean, we're just excited. They have great players. I mean, we'll start doing scouting on them tomorrow I guess. But I mean, they're going to be hard to guard, I'm sure, but I mean we're a great team, too, and we're just looking forward to that match-up if it happens. Q. Your three-pointer, when you got the pass from Beau, were you expecting to get the ball in that situation, or were you kind of surprised that he didn't put it up himself? DOMINIQUE KIRK: Not really. When I passed the ball I thought he was going to shoot it. But he just made a great move, penetrated. And in the pinch I was just getting ready, man, like we do in practice all the time. He seen me right there on the wing, and I was just ready to shoot. Q. When you guys had that 11-point lead, then they came back, what was it that kept you guys from folding and sort of letting them taking over the game? JOSH CARTER: I think we pride ourselves on toughness and being poised. We were able to just fight through it and not get down on ourselves, like we would have in the past, and we just come together as a team, and we were just able to battle and keep fighting. Q. Dominique, some of the games where Josh has gotten hot early, that seems like it turbocharges you guys. Texas, K-State, some other games. I think, does it, as much as it seems, when he gets going early, does that jolt the whole team? DOMINIQUE KIRK: Oh yeah. Well, when we get Josh rolling, it opens up a lot for us, because they're going to, you know, pay attention to him a lot. Then we just throw it down inside to Joe or B.D. or one of the big guys and just play from there. Q. Dominique, on the defensive end, they're a team that likes to shoot threes. How conscious were you of that and does it really keep you on your toes, knowing no matter how far they are they can launch it? DOMINIQUE KIRK: They're a great shooting team. Coach told us that's why we had the big guy guarded one-on-one. We just got to stay close to shooters because they're really a good three-pointer-shooting team. We just got to keep battling with them. They did a great job shooting, and we just tried to do our best. Q. With their big men, they're not very good free-throw shooters. How much did that -- did you take that into consideration in terms of a defensive game plan? BRYAN DAVIS: We just all wanted to play as solid as we can and make them shoot overhand every time. JOSEPH JONES: We're not trying to foul. Just trying to play tough defense and make the hard, tough shots. THE MODERATOR: Any further questions? All right. Well, thank you, student-athletes. Good luck on Saturday. We'll know open the floor to questions with the head coach. Q. Mark, do you have an explanation why, was it just the loss of Aci Law, or why do you think that Josh has been so inconsistent shooting the three this year? COACH TURGEON: That's the majority of it. His role changed. Went from Aci Law on Joe's team to where he had to become a big-time scorer for us. And I had a Sweet 16 team at Wichita State, and we lost one player and it changed everything. Being the new coach here, I couldn't, you know, say Aci was that important or missing. I couldn't make excuses for why guys weren't playing as well, but Aci made us all better. And, you know, you lose the first-team All-American, it makes everybody better. But Josh doesn't get a lot of open looks. And when he did get them, he rushed them a little bit. And it helps us when Dominique's hitting threes or Beau came in and hit threes. As the season wore on, we got Josh more looks. But most of Josh's threes last year were stand-still. Kind of like Dominique hit the one late there, now he's got to come off screens to get them. They're not there. You can't penetrate and pitch to him because they're not going to help off. So it's whole different game for him this year. And he is a much -- believe it or not, he is a much better player than he was last year. I mean, the floater in the lane, coming off the screen, I mean, the kid's come a long ways throughout the season. He's got a long ways to go. He was fantastic. He hit his first one. That was big for us. Q. Coach, when the jump shots started falling early in the game, did you have a feeling this was going to be one of your stronger offensive efforts because the jump shot inconsistency has been one of the main problems this year? COACH TURGEON: Well, you know the reason we got jump shots and UCLA won't do it, or Mississippi Valley State won't do it, is they doubled our post. We got wide open looks. And we practiced it all week. We knew they were going to do it, and we were prepared for it and we knocked them down. Then it got to be a little tougher to got shots. We didn't score quite as frequently after that started. But, no, that was nice. But we were still disappointed that we hadn't established an inside game. I had somebody yell at me, "Throw it inside." I said, "We're trying," you know, at half-time. We made a minor adjustment and got the ball a little deeper to our guys and our post guys finished. But we're an inside out team. That's the way we have to perform. We had 18 assists tonight. It's been hard for us to have assists, 18 assists on 25 baskets. We're coming. I keep saying we're coming. It's just taking a long time for us to figure everything out with this team. And we just keep getting a little bit better in our half-court offense and our execution. Our execution down the stretch tonight was phenomenal. I mean, we got the ball right where we wanted, we made plays, and against a really good defensive team. I mean, they're only giving up about 38% field-goal percentage for the year, and we shot 54 on them. We did a nice job tonight. Q. Coach, did you feel like this was a match-up where Josh could really get going and break out a little bit? COACH TURGEON: You know, with this team, I never know what's going to happen in a game. When he hit his first couple, it just happen to be where he was open, we did a good job of swinging the ball to him, you know, it helped. The one thing is, and we scouted the heck out of them, we've been working on these guys for three days. We did a great job of guarding them. They average 74. We held them to 62 points. I feel like we knew every one of their sets. I got a million of them. And we might not run them because it's just taken me so long to figure this team out. They might not know all our sets. With that said, we snuck a couple baskets for Josh they might not have seen. UCLA or Mississippi Valley State is going to scout us better, see us in person, those might not be there. But I thought we were able to get, you know, more open shots now we're out of the league obviously. They would probably say the same thing. But our game plan was pretty solid and our guys did a good job defensively with it. But we snuck out a few shots. Q. You said earlier that you knew they were going to double the posts. And sometimes, does that mean they were sort of daring you to beat them with the three or they were sort of giving that to you? COACH TURGEON: Yeah, they played three big schools this year. They played Louisville, Michigan State, and Carolina, and they doubled the post every time. We watch so much film, I can't even tell you. My assistant coaches did an unbelievable job. I think I watched -- I think I watched about eight games myself, which is a lot for me. So we felt like we knew exactly what they were going to do. And now, when things weren't going well, we let down, we turned the ball over and let down. But we had to take away a secondary break-point, or excuse me, transition points. For the most part, we took care of the ball, we did that. The other way to get threes is when they throw the ball to the post. We took that part of the game away. And then offensive rebounds, I thought in the second half we limited them to one shot and it took things away. But I can't remember what your question was now. I'm so tired. Q. Were they, like, daring? COACH TURGEON: Yeah, they were daring us. But if I'm on his bench and you look at us in warm-ups, I am a little nervous, too. You know, we look big and strong. So it's the right game plan. We just happen to make shots tonight. We made them, and it worked out well and gave us a nice little lead. We knew they were going to come back. Q. Mark, all that being said, can you comment specifically on Bryan and Joe's performances tonight? Bryan had real fluid moves; Joe with strong rebounds there. COACH TURGEON: I thought Bryan was really good defensively. That's a hard match-up for Bryan Davis, chasing that kid around all night. We got beat a couple times on dribble penetration, a couple threes. But they were great. We challenged them at half-time. We didn't think our bigs were playing very well. They weren't establishing anything. You know, I thought defensively, Junior was playing pretty well on placed. But we really challenged them. Like I said, we made a minor adjustment to get the ball to them in a better position and it worked for us. Bryan's jump hooks, I mean, boy, looked great. And they had a great week of practice. Coach Smith told them before the games it was our best week of practice with post guys, really worked hard. We got an advantage in there, and we need to try to take advantage of it, and they did. But Joe stepped up and made free throws. I thought we did a great job on Plaisted. He is a hard guard. He is so fast and he jumps into you. We did hands-back and maybe guarding Michael Beasley a couple times this year, helped us guard him. Q. Is this as complete a game or as good an effort as you have seen all season from this team? COACH TURGEON: We've had a lot of good ones. You can always be critical. You know, I thought we let down, you know, transition defense, and defensively right before half-time. We made some really silly mistakes right before half-time. But I think the last ten minutes, we were as good as we've been in a while. I mean, our defensive effort, our transition, our execution, trying to take good shots, we forced one shot. Josh forced a shot then had a silly foul. But besides that, you can't think of many things that these kids didn't do right. So, you know, on a big-time stage, they stepped up for me and really executed. THE MODERATOR: We have to wrap it up right there. Thank you, coach. End of FastScripts |
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