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NCAA MEN'S 1ST & 2ND ROUNDS REGIONALS: MIAMIMarch 20, 2009Jim BoylenTyler KepkayLuke NevilleMIAMI, FLORIDA Arizona 84 COACH JIM BOYLEN: I'm proud of my team, and thankful for the year we had. I'm thankful to be the coach at Utah. It wasn't one of our better nights, but you know, that happens. We're going to build on it and grow from it, learn from it, and I love my seniors, and I'm going to miss them. And I wish them the best. Q. Tyler, you guys were playing catch-up most of the night it seemed. And you hit that three from the right that made it 64-62. At that point were you guys thinking you had them? TYLER KEPKAY: Yeah, we thought that we were going to come back and tie the game until the last minute basically when you knew it was kind of over. You know, we knew we were going to keep fighting and pushing, and regardless of that three, we thought we were going to come back no matter what. Q. Tyler, could you talk about what was so challenging about the press that they put on you and the damage they did early? It seemed like they really got you out of sorts. TYLER KEPKAY: Early they came out aggressive as can be, and they're long and athletic. They just made it tough in the very beginning, and I think that kind of hurt us for the rest of the game because I think if you take away that first, I don't know, six, seven minutes of the game, it's a different game. But that's the way it goes. Q. Luke, obviously one of the worst things that can happen for you guys is to get in early foul trouble. Can you talk about what happened those first couple minutes when you got those two quick fouls. LUKE NEVILL: I thought I was playing good D. I had my hands up in the air. They just happened. Sometimes you play in games, and you just get calls that you might not agree with, but that's the way it goes. But I thought our team kind of held in there and they shot the ball well when I was out, and even though we were down, we were sticking around when I wasn't on the court. Q. Luke, you had obviously the four fouls when you came back in, and they went at you a couple times in that last run, Hill scoring in the lane and I think Budinger had the lay-up. How would you characterize how you play with four fouls? Did you just sort of feel like you couldn't do much other than just stand there with your arms up or not really contest the way you would like? LUKE NEVILL: Yeah, it's tricky, when I get in foul trouble to stay on the court, I have to just, like you said, play with my arms straight up, not jump at all and just hope that my body in front of him is going to deter the shot. Sometimes I can't even step up in front of him because I don't want to get a 50/50 call. So it's hard to just kind of watch the ball get laid up and knowing that I could do something about it but not wanting to risk getting my fifth foul and sitting on the bench. Q. You guys started out early, I think it was 2-for-11 shooting, and then you had nine or ten turnovers there in the first ten minutes. Which is the easier one to resolve and which is the more important one to deal with, because it's kind of a two-headed monster, both of those? LUKE NEVILL: Definitely I think the turnovers were our downfall. We're going to shoot the ball bad sometimes and we're going to shoot the ball great sometimes. We were getting the shots that we wanted. We were shooting the ball great the day before. It just wasn't our night. The balls were good shots, they were bouncing in and out. If you take them again, they might go in. So it definitely was the turnovers was our downfall. LARRY WAHL: We'll release the student-athletes and now entertain questions for Coach Boylen. Q. What was the first six, seven minutes kind of your worst case scenario as far as the way they would come out? COACH JIM BOYLEN: I talked to my staff and you're watching all these games the last two days and you've got to be careful to get down early and then you're in an uphill grind the whole day. We were ready for the press. We expected the press. We practiced the press. Didn't do a good job of handling the pressure. We were right there, down five at halftime. I think we're 7-7 this year down at halftime. We've been right there before. We were thought we were right there and played poorly. The second half we were grinding uphill and grinding uphill, and got it to two and just didn't make enough plays. I thought we had some good looks. I thought we had the right guys shooting the ball, and they didn't go down. We won the rebound game, we lost the turnover game and we were 8-for-32 from the three. Tough to win that way, tough to win. Q. Did you think your guys were skittish at all on this stage? COACH JIM BOYLEN: I didn't think they were skittish, I just didn't think we held the pressure very well. We fought back. We didn't quit and we hung in there. If Borha makes two of those four threes he takes in the first four minutes. And Kim Tillie misses a lay-up, we're right there. That happens, that's basketball. You know, you've got to give them credit, too. They played well. You know, that's not the team tonight I saw on tape for 10, 12 games, and you've got to give them credit for that. They played well. Q. Just your thoughts on Nic Wise and what he did to you guys in the second half. He was able to get in the lane. COACH JIM BOYLEN: Yeah, when Nic is playing with four fouls that's easy to do. I thought his quickness hurt us. I thought we had two switches we handled poorly that he scored on. He scored a three and he scored a lay-up on two poor switches, and he got it going, and you've got to give him credit for that. He's a good player. I think the difference for him was he took off his tights. I don't know if you noticed that, he took off his tights. So maybe that's the key for him, taking off your tights. Q. Is that the kind of situation, that start that you had, probably what makes you toss and turn, sometimes you don't sleep before the games? It's got to be maybe your worst nightmare, playing out that way? COACH JIM BOYLEN: Yeah, you don't script it to start that way. You don't talk to your team about starting that way. But we've had bad starts before and won. We got it to two. We turned the ball over when we got it to two and then the game kind of separated again. My guys battled. I thought "Utah" across their chest meant something today, and I'm proud of what we did. We didn't win, and that's the tough thing about this business. Somebody wins, somebody loses. But we're going to keep building this program. We're going to keep getting tougher. We're lifting Monday morning at 6:00 o'clock. The beat goes on. Q. You play hard all year, you get a 5 seed and then you go up against Arizona, who's obviously a very talented team, but the way they played, they end up with a 12 seed. So talk about that, playing a team that to a lot of people could have been a top 20 team, but for whatever reason they're a 12. COACH JIM BOYLEN: I don't know. Not to be disrespectful to your question, I never got into all that. You step over the line, you've got to slap it on and play. Whether you're a 12 seed, a 5 seed, a 1 seed, a 2 seed, you've got to play. They played better than we did today, and they won. That's the way it is. Q. How are you going to remember the seniors that got this thing rolling for you again in this program? COACH JIM BOYLEN: I'm going to remember the tough days, the days when they didn't like me very much, and then I'm going to remember the days that we improved, when we grew together and we trusted each other. You know, there's things that cannot be taken away from these guys now. You know, they won the league championship, won the conference tournament, won the Wilkes championship. These guys won three championships this year. These guys have never won anything in their lives. Lawrence Borha said, "I've never won anything in my life." That's what I remember. These guys are leaving winners. They're leaving Utes, and they'll be Utes forever and they'll be my guys forever. Q. Was it strictly kind of a feel thing as far as how long you could keep Luke out when he got the fourth? COACH JIM BOYLEN: I've never played him in the first half with two fouls all year. I've never done that, and I had to do it today, and I thought he hung in there pretty well, hung in there pretty well. You know, I thought towards the end he had a couple 50/50 plays that went our way. He probably could have got his third foul three or four times there at the end and didn't get it, which is a credit to who he is as a player. I think they know who he is. But I thought his first two calls were a little soft. We don't like a game called tightly, and I don't think the referees did a poor job, but you have to adjust to that, and I want a free-flowing game where we can hit people and play, and I thought they called it pretty tight from the start, and that's not the best thing for us. That's the way it is. You've got to adjust. Q. I think 32 is your highest number of three-pointers on the year and you had a lot of open ones today. It seemed like there were two or three times where you'd have an advantage on the break and they pulled up and shot it. I wonder what you thought about that. COACH JIM BOYLEN: Yeah, if they go in nobody says a word, right, and if they don't go in people say, well, you should have passed it. We were going to play our basketball here, whether we were playing the Celtics, the Lakers, whatever. We were going to play our basketball. We were going to play the way we play. We were going to run it up and down, we've ran it all year, we shoot the ball, shoot threes, we punch it inside, we play the game. I didn't think we took a whole lot of bad shots. Did they take some quick shots? Yeah. We've taken quick shots all year. We had it to two, didn't finish it off. That's the story. Q. Do you feel like some of those three-pointers, it seemed like some of them rolled around and in and out. COACH JIM BOYLEN: It's the humidity, we're not used to it. Plus we play with adidas balls -- no, I'm just kidding you. They just didn't go in, man. Q. The press initially, was it the speed at all that you couldn't practiced for? Was there a faster team you had faced all year? COACH JIM BOYLEN: Yeah, their athleticism and length bothered us to start the game. You talk about those things, but it's like getting married - your older brother talks to you about it, are you sure you want to do this? Yeah, yeah, yeah, and then you go do it and you realize it's a little different than maybe what you thought. So my wife is sitting right over there, that's why I said that. But it's hard to simulate it. I thought they played with a lot of energy. Again, I don't think that's the team we saw on tape, but we knew we were going to get a good shot from them. I thought they played with a sense of urgency. You've got to give them credit for that, and they beat us today. Thanks a lot. LARRY WAHL: Thank you very much, Coach. End of FastScripts |
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