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NCAA MEN'S 1ST & 2ND ROUNDS REGIONALS: DAYTONMarch 20, 2009Bruce PearlTyler SmithCameron TatumDAYTON, OHIO Oklahoma State – 77 THE MODERATOR: Joining us are Tennessee student-athletes Cameron Tatum and Tyler Smith. Coach Pearl, opening statement, please. COACH PEARL: Oklahoma State played very well, particularly in the offensive end and had their way with us with their ball screen offense. Marshall Moses' elevated play was a real factor in and around the basket, and making one-on-one plays, scoring on the post, and then, of course, Byron Eaton off the bounce was very, very effective. Both from a strategy point by the coaches, as well as in execution standpoint by the players, we did a lousy job on ball screen defense. We played a lot of good basketball out there today, and we played against a really good team, one of the better teams we played in a few weeks, and we're right there. We were right there. THE MODERATOR: Questions for the student-athletes only, please. Q. Tyler, that last play with Eaton, what did you see? TYLER SMITH: Where he scored? We were trying to switch the ball screens. He refused the ball screen guy, penetration in the middle what he had been doing all day where we were trying to just keep him out of the lane. He got in the lane and made a tough play. Q. Tyler, can you just talk about your last shot and what you saw, where it was headed? TYLER SMITH: I had Cameron on a circle back. Those are plays we run every day in practice, as we're shooting. It's just a drill that we run. He came off and his man was really tight and just tried to get a shot off. And I thought it was good. But bounced right out. Q. Tyler, I hate to throw this at you right at the spur of the moment but I don't know when I'll see you again. Any sense this was your last game or what are your thoughts toward that? TYLER SMITH: Right now I'm still on this game. My teammates, we worried about on the court what's going to happen to us when we get back, really not worried about that right now. Q. Cameron, you guys came in. You had the worst shooting percentage of 3s. Do you think they laid off you a little bit not expecting you to make as many 3s? CAMERON TATUM: I think they did just a little bit. Like you said, field goal percentage and 3-point percentage hasn't been good our season has been up and down, a lot of teams scouting report said back off of them and make them shoot 3s and zone us up. And Coach Pearl and my teammates was always saying shoot with confidence, to me and Scotty and Wayne, and we just tried to knock them down as much as we can. THE MODERATOR: Thanks, guys. Questions for Coach. Q. Talk about the last -- the very last play and what you wanted from referee Mike Sanzere, looked like you wanted some sort of foul call. COACH PEARL: Don't bait me into getting fined here. This is a little different stage. I thought we ran a handoff that we run in practice all the time. And I wanted to give Tyler a ball screen from Wayne and see if I could get a big on Tyler. And see if he could get to the rim first. They walled it off pretty good. So he came around and he was -- Cameron was circling back, and Cameron's man came into Tyler pretty good. But with all the contact, it still opened things up for Tyler to get a pretty good look. It's a shot that he takes and makes a lot at the end of practice. So the first option was for him to get to the rim. The second option was a circle back. And I just wanted to put the ball in his hands and let that be, I didn't want anybody else taking that last shot. At least I wanted him to be able to, if there was a pass or hand off, any other opportunity, I wanted it to be his. Q. You mentioned the execution problems. You also said that coaches did a lousy job. Hind site being 20/20 in preparation, hindsight being 20/20, what were you referring to? COACH PEARL: We never covered ball screens well all season long. We struggled in ball screen defense and we struggled today. Byron Eaton and Marshall Moses had their way with those ball screens. I put several different guys on Eaton and they took advantage of Brian Williams and Emmanuel and Wayne and the little/big ball screen offense, and we never did wall it off, like we were able to do, we were able to wall off Florida and able to stop Courtney Fortson or some other guys, Byron Eaton, was that much better turning corners and getting to the rim. Jumping in and creating contact. Q. Bruce, 56 shots today, 33 of them from 3. Was that the plan or just the way it turned out? COACH PEARL: When there are five white shirts sitting inside that 3-point line, that's what's going to happen sometimes. 75 points in an NCAA Tournament game is plenty of points to win. I thought we scored enough to win. We scored 41 points in the second half. And we made six 3s in the second half. So 33 percent from 3 is something that you can live with. My problem was our defense. Q. Wayne and Tyler can come back. What are you going to say to them? Are you going to encourage them to come back? COACH PEARL: We'll evaluate it. There's no way you can make that decision right now. We've got several juniors that will go through the evaluation process. And we'll make the best decisions when we have information. That's down the road right now. We've got time for that. Q. In the second half there were some stretches where J.P. didn't play. At times he's been really effective against the zone. What was the thought process -- COACH PEARL: Cameron Tatum was playing really well. Cameron was playing well. And they were packed in. They were so packed in that we tried to -- we used Cameron a little bit more at the 3 to open up the lane, and I thought it did. You know, it's tough. Wayne Chism only had one 2-point basket and that's tough. And Brian Williams only one 2-point basket. Emanual Negedu, who played six minutes had two 2-point baskets. That was hard. And I thought we got some pretty good -- I thought they got the ball in there. We turned it over in the post. So I guess I would maybe fault our offense in that sense in the sense that we didn't get good -- we didn't get very good conversions at the 5. Q. This season has been a lot of ups and downs throughout the entire season. What did you tell your team when you will got back in the locker room after today's game? COACH PEARL: I told them a lot of things. But I wanted them to know how close we were to being a really good team, to being a great team. We were really close. And at times we showed it. I wanted them to know that Sunday there will be 16 teams left, and that's in two days from now. So I wanted them to know how close they were to being in a situation whereof all the great teams in the country only 16 left. And so we know we missed an opportunity to do that this year. And we're certainly disappointed. But we talked a great deal about the things that ailed us throughout the year that cost us in this final game as well as some things that we needed to do in the future to fix that. Q. Right before tip-off, it was announced that Josh Tab couldn't play the first half. Was it a curfew or meeting thing? COACH PEARL: Just a violation of team rules. Q. Bruce, has this been a hard year for you? COACH PEARL: Had we not come back and beaten Mississippi State, Florida and South Carolina on the road, this would have been a very hard year for me. But we did win those three games and we did win the East again, for the third time in four years. And we did get to the conference tournament championship, and it was disappointing to not win that game, because I thought at that point we had a chance to prove that we may have been the best team in the SEC. I've said this a lot. This season could have been a little better. But it could have been a lot worse. We got good leadership down the stretch and it took this team a while to come together. We lost five of our top nine players and four guards. And I would say that I did not get this team to play as well as it was capable of playing with enough consistency. It achieved at a high level. But we probably will walk away from this campaign and think we left a little bit on the table. THE MODERATOR: Thank you, Coach. End of FastScripts |
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