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NCAA MEN'S 1ST & 2ND ROUNDS REGIONALS: PHILADELPHIAMarch 21, 2009Josh CarterDonald SloanMark TurgeonPHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA Connecticut – 92 THE MODERATOR: We're joined by Texas A&M student-athletes and Coach Mark Turgeon. We'll ask coach to make an opening statement. COACH TURGEON: Too big, too fast, too good. They played great. We were a little intimidated early. We didn't do what we were supposed to do early and got behind. I thought they were great and we weren't as good as we're capable of being, so... THE MODERATOR: Questions for the student-athletes. Q. Josh, coach just talked about how he thought y'all were intimidated early. Why do you feel that is? JOSH CARTER: I don't think we were intimidated. Just, I mean, we didn't come out and play well. Coach did a great job of giving us a game plan defensively and offensively. We just didn't execute well. And that's what it came down to. Q. Donald, same thing for you? DONALD SLOAN: You know, I just echo what Josh said. I agree totally. You know, think our guys came out with a few butterflies. Big game, big stage. You know, we pretty much shot fast, didn't execute to our highest abilities. But, you know, I don't think guys were just intimidated nor scared. Q. How good is that UConn team? Are they one of the best you've seen or other teams in the Big 12 similar to them? JOSH CARTER: I think they're a great team. They did a lot of things well. I mean, I give credit to them. They did a great job. But we also had a lot of open looks we didn't knock down. Shots we usually make at a high rate, we just didn't get it done today. Give credit to their defense, as well. Q. Donald, can you talk a little bit about the trouble you had containing Price today. DONALD SLOAN: It all came down to ball screens. He used them pretty well. We tried this, tried that. He just found ways around it somehow, whether he was making other guys -- putting them in a position to score, or he was doing the scoring, coming off the ball screens. He got kind of got through the course of the game at one point in time. But, you know, he's a good guard, so, you know, I didn't expect any less from him. But I felt we could have contained him a little better. That's about it. Q. Josh, seven of nine wins to close out the season. Could you talk about how y'all would consider this a successful season. JOSH CARTER: I mean, I'm sure I'll look back on it later on and think about it as a successful season. But just right now, it just hurts. It's hard to think about, I mean, all the success we had at this point in time. But, I mean, we made a good run to get here. But came up short. Just didn't play well today. Q. Josh, how are you going to look back on these four years? JOSH CARTER: I was just thinking about that out there. It's been a good four years. But it's just hard to swallow today. I mean, my team expects me to make shots and things like that. And they put me in great situations today. I didn't get it done. And to know I'll never have a chance to redeem myself with these guys, get them another win or something like that is just hard to swallow right now. Q. Donald, same question for you in terms of it being a successful season. DONALD SLOAN: Well, like Josh said, we fought to get to this point. At the beginning we weren't even mentioned being in the picture. We fought to get to where we at. Obviously I'm not happy right now. But, you know, the things we've done all season long has brought us closer, made us a better team to even get to this point. I have to say for that it's been pretty good. Right now, knowing that the season is over, a couple plays of executing well, a couple stops, a couple defensive rebounds, we're still playing. But we didn't get it done today. That's pretty much what you're thinking about. You're not really thinking about what we've done two months ago, three months ago, so... Q. Donald, you pretty much have the whole team back next year. Does that give you confidence you can build on this? DONALD SLOAN: Yeah. We got a lot of young guys that played tremendous all year. You know, to have as many guys as we have coming back next year, you know, it will be special, it will be a pretty good team. But couldn't get it done this year. Hopefully, next year it will be a lot better. THE MODERATOR: Thank you, guys. We'll continue with questions for COACH TURGEON. Q. Was that the worst possible way to start a game that you could have envisioned? Did you feel a little bit like the BYU coach against you guys the last two years? COACH TURGEON: I know what I thought. I don't know what he felt like. We didn't expect that. We expected to give them a good game and we expected to win today. You know, we came out the first possession and guarded the first ball screen wrong, and I knew something was the matter. And then we just totally -- offensively we worked on some things to get some movement in our offense. We stood around, in the post, took a quick timeout. I thought we were going to get better at that point, but we didn't. Came down to we just could not guard them. We couldn't guard them. We could never put anything together because we could never get a stop. We had a couple chances to cut it to 10 or whatever. But we just couldn't guard 'em. But, you know, after the first five or six minutes, I thought we executed pretty well. We did shoot a little bit too quick. We talked about that. You're trying to come back in one possession, and you can't do that. I thought our execution was pretty well. We didn't play well. But I think they had a lot to do with it. Q. Talking about UConn without Jerome Dyson being a national championship team. How do they look as a title contender? COACH TURGEON: If they keep playing like they have the last two games. I don't think I've played a team like them since I've been at Texas A&M, played some good teams when we were at Wichita. Shooting the ball like that, that Price is in total control of the game. He's dictating the whole game out there offensively and defensively. And the thing that I was -- I was really impressed offensively how hard they are to guard. They're just so hard to guard. I didn't think they'd be that hard to guard. Then you have the big fellow in the back blocking shots. If they can continue to shoot two to one free throws like that for the rest of the year, that gives them a good chance. I definitely think they have a chance to be a national champion. Q. You mentioned you weren't age to guard them. Is that because they were that good? COACH TURGEON: Well, we haven't been the best defensive team. Our teams usually guard. We weren't great defensively this year. We were good. We weren't great. And I kept urging the guys down the stretch, when we started to win games down the stretch, that we have to get better defensively. And we did get better. It was a combination of us and it was a combination of them. They made some tough shots today. When Adrien is hitting the shots he was hitting, we knew he could make those shots, we had to give him something, they're really hard to guard. Their two seniors were obviously really good today. But it was a combination of them being really good offensively and us just not being very good. Q. With the way the first 20 minutes went, what do you try to tell a team at the half to get them going? COACH TURGEON: Well, the thing I told them at halftime is the thing I'm most proud about this team is we've fought all year. You can think at Kansas, we didn't play well, okay? KU had something to do with it, but we were a little dead, never made a run on Kansas. And I just said, Guys, there's no quitting in us. No one's going to hang their head. We're going to keep playing. If I hang my head, say something to me. We started out pretty well. We just couldn't get a stop. I think if we just could have put two or three stops together, we could have put a little pressure on them. There was no pressure on them all day. They were up 20 all day. Like us against BYU, no pressure on us offensively, so you were loose shooting the ball. Really surprised we never made a run. That's a credit to them, how good they are. Q. When you took the quick timeout, was that to talk defense primarily? COACH TURGEON: It was just to get their heads in the building. I mean, I just thought we were totally out of it, weren't doing anything that I had asked them to do. And I just wanted them to -- I just thought if we could just start over, it was only 4-0, we could start over, we had that glossy-eyed look. We weren't executing offensively the way I wanted them to, weren't guarding the way I wanted them to. Gave up a lot of easy shots today that we haven't been giving up. Maybe it's UConn, but we looked totally different today than we've looked the last month and a half of the season. Give them credit. So I was just trying to wake them up say, All right, guys, it's 4-0, start over. One timeout. We'll be okay. UConn was just too good. Q. Looking back, do you consider this a successful season? Also the idea that you're only losing Josh among your starters and only two seniors. COACH TURGEON: I think it was a really, really good year. I don't want to say great year. I think it was a really, really good year. I think everybody had us pencilled in the NIT. Obviously our league's pretty good. Our league's done pretty well. To fight back and do what we did. I don't want to make a big deal out of our first part of our Big 12 schedule again, came back to bite me. But it was hard. It was hard early. We just kept fighting and scratching. This year worried me coming in. Over the last two years, the players this program has lost. The thing I'm most proud of is we developed the guys. We really developed 'em. We became a good basketball team. We just weren't very good today. But, no, to get 24 wins, not a lot of teams out there with 24 wins that played the schedule we played. I'm pretty proud of this group. It's no fun today. We wanted more. You always want more. But we were consistent. Last year we were so up and down. This year we were so much more consistent. Even though we didn't look it today, we were so much more consistent. I liked our fight. I like the way our program's going. I don't want to get into in connection year yet. I'm going to miss Josh Carter and Bryson Graham a lot. Josh has had an incredible career. He was humble. He's going to have a smile on his face about his career. Bryson Graham didn't get on the floor. Was a tremendous leader for us. As soon as his knee got healthy, he helped us in practice a lot. We're going to miss those two guys. We got to get a lot better, bigger and stronger. We got to get a lot better. We got some guys that work habits got to get a little bit better in the off-season. Mentally we got to get a lot better if we want to make -- if we want to be an NCAA tournament team and one-and-done type deal, or do we want to be a really great program, the guys in the program have to get a lot better between now and next year. THE MODERATOR: Thank you, coach. End of FastScripts |
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