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NCAA MEN'S 1ST & 2ND ROUNDS REGIONALS: MINNEAPOLIS

March 20, 2009

Bob Huggins

MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

Dayton Â– 68
West Virginia - 60

MODERATOR: We are joined on the dais by West Virginia student-athletes Darryl Bryant to my far left and Da'Sean Butler and Head Coach Bob Huggins. We will start by taking questions from the student-athletes.

Q. Da'Sean, you guys seemed to get closer and closer in the second half and pull within a bucket or two a few times. What happened that you just weren't quite able to get over that hump?
DA'SEAN BUTLER: Pretty much the last five minutes, whatever the case may be, outworked us. They got a lot of loose balls. They dove on a lot of loose balls and got a lot of offensive rebounds. And it just bit us towards the end of the game. You can't give up that many offensive rebounds and not get on the ball and let them get second chances at scoring, which they do very well.

Q. When Alex had the two foul shots that would have tied the game if he made them and he missed them, do you think that was an emotional blow to the team?
DA'SEAN BUTLER: That was one of them. We had a lot of chances to take the lead in the game. Me myself, I had a bunch of opportunities to help the team go over the hump and be up by one or two, you know, but we just didn't do it and we lost.

Q. Darryl, you come in averaging a little over 10 and were able to get 21. What was working for you? Did you just kind of want to pick up the slack when a couple of the other guys were not quite as successful?
DARRYL BRYANT: I knew they wasn't scoring too much so you just tried to play a little bit better and I just made open shots tonight. It wasn't that I did anything different, I just made open shots and attacked when I felt I had a good chance to attack.

Q. Da'Sean, throughout that second half, did you ever -- did you always have confidence that you were going to get over that? Did you think that sooner or later here things would start clicking? What is kind of going through your mind?
DA'SEAN BUTLER: Definitely. Granted we had a little bit of problems scoring, you know, but we did pretty well for a couple of plays when we were running on defense, we had a couple of stops and then we scored a couple of times in the same possession. So I definitely thought we were going to come back.
It's, you know -- you can't give up baskets and score and then give up more baskets and score. It just kept going back and forth a lot and we didn't have as many stops as we needed to to pull the game out.

Q. Darryl, from what you have seen from Wright on film, I mean, was he everything that you thought he would be? And what did kind of those dunks -- some of them change the momentum of the game?
DARRYL BRYANT: Well, I knew Chris Wright way before this game. We were on the same team in camp one year so I definitely knew what his abilities were. And he just had a good night tonight. And honestly, some of the dunks did change the game, one of the and-one dunks changed the game. But we still in it and we just didn't capitalize down the stretch.
MODERATOR: Okay, we'll go ahead and excuse the student-athletes back to the locker room.

Q. Bob, why were they able to get so many lay-ups in the first half?
COACH HUGGINS: We didn't do a very good job guarding them. They got a spread. We just didn't do as good a job as probably what we normally do, and they played really well.
I don't know that -- I don't know that our guys watching film knew they were as explosive as what they are.

Q. With that said, are they as quick defense to offense as you've seen this year?
COACH HUGGINS: You know, I don't think they hurt us as bad in transition as what I was afraid they were going to. They hurt us in half court. I mean, they just spread us out. We didn't -- we didn't have an answer for penetration from Wright or Little. And Little made some really hard shots at the end of the game. He made hard shots over the top of people.

Q. Bob, the defensive job that they were able to do on Da'Sean and Alex on the perimeter, was it more the defense? Or did those two have an off night shooting the ball?
COACH HUGGINS: I thought Da had great looks. I thought they probably did a better job on Alex than they did on Da honestly. We run a set to start the game and Da had a wide-open look and hit the rim and one open in the corner and it is short. And we're down one and he had a great look. There wasn't anybody around him. And those are shots that, you know, he has been making, he just didn't make them.

Q. Coach, seemed like the first half today was like the first half against Syracuse. Not a whole lot of zip or energy. Any explanation for that?
COACH HUGGINS: No. No, we didn't have great practices early in the week, but I thought we were better. I thought we were better yesterday. I thought we had a lot more bounce in our step yesterday.
They were really physical with us, I think, and they took us out of really running offense. I thought we did a better job of running offense in the second half. We got more things at the rim. But they kind of checked our cuts and we just didn't find it very much in the first half, quite honestly.

Q. Coach, Chris Wright had 27 points and 10 rebounds and wondering your impressions of how he played.
COACH HUGGINS: He played great. But we knew he was capable of doing it. I watched Chris play for a lot of years. He's a very, very talented guy. And he made shots. He doesn't always make shots and he made perimeter shots today which makes him even harder to guard.
And Little made shots, hard shots as well. He made some shots over the top of us. And at the end of the game when they needed baskets to kind of stop the bleeding for them, and, you know, that's what you want your upperclassmen to do, to step up and make shots like that.

Q. Bob, did you feel as if you could tie it once, that the whole thing would swing? You can never get over that hump.
COACH HUGGINS: Well, you know, you got an 80-some percent free-throw shooter shooting two free throws and he misses both of them. And Da'Sean is maybe our best 3-point shooter and he has a wide-open look down by one. And you know, that one had a chance.
The other ones didn't have much of a chance. But that one had a chance and it bounces, and bounces up in the air and hits the front of the rim and bounces off. We just didn't -- we just didn't make the plays that we needed to make and they made plays that they needed to make.
I told our guys at halftime we have lost 12 games and we haven't scored 70 points. And we have to score some points. So, you know, I think our defense is okay. They had 11 field goals in the second half, and, you know, two of them came because we didn't switch when we worked on switching for four days. I mean, and they made hard shots.
Chris made hard shots and Little made hard shots.
MODERATOR: Okay, if there are no further questions, Coach, we appreciate the time.
COACH HUGGINS: Thank you.

End of FastScripts

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