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SOUTHEASTERN CONFERENCE MEN'S TOURNAMENTMarch 13, 2010Scotty HopsonBruce PearlJ.P. PrinceNASHVILLE, TENNESSEE Kentucky - 74 THE MODERATOR: We're ready to begin with Tennessee. We'll ask Coach Pearl for some general comments on the game, then we'll take your questions for the two student-athletes. And then we'll finish up with coach. Coach, would you begin. COACH PEARL: We're extremely disappointed. It was -- Kentucky is a great opponent. Defense and rebounding win championships and they're the best defense of any team in our league. It was a real struggle to score against them. It required a tremendous amount of energy to get open and to get good looks. And we just didn't have it. I thought we battled back on a couple of occasions and felt like we had a chance. But like a great team, they put us away and made shots. That was a real key for them, the fact that Bledsoe shot the ball so well from a spot that he can shoot it from. THE MODERATOR: Let's take your questions for either of the student-athletes. Q. J.P., can you just talk about the lack of offensive continuity. It appeared you guys weren't passing it around with the same efficiency you had in these first couple games. J.P. PRINCE: They just made it tough on us. They obviously had us frustrated. We didn't make shots. We just got in a hurry. We kind of lost our composure at the end and didn't execute, listen to the coaches, and overall just kind of let it go at the end. Didn't execute like we did the last time we played them. Q. Scotty, as good as Kentucky is defensively, you had some success driving against them, drew a foul a couple of times, made a basket. In retrospect, do you think maybe you should have tried to do more of that? SCOTTY HOPSON: I think so. I was just trying to make plays for my team. Coach said it's going to take something special to beat these guys, and I knew my contribution to this team was definitely a big factor in our success. So just tried to step up and make plays. Q. J.P., can you just talk about how you lead this performance here and how it will affect you next week when you go into the NCAA. J.P. PRINCE: You've just got to learn from it. Go back, watch the film, see what you did wrong. We've got to be more physical. We let the big guys affect us. We got to protect our bigs by helping them rebound. And we let them play one on one and let them get cheap fouls on them, and we just can't do that. You can't do that against big teams. With their kind of size, you can't get in foul trouble early. We did a terrible job of protecting our bigs, and we put them in a tough spot. Q. Because the officials really let both teams play, let the play go, how hard was it to get to the goal? It seemed like there was a lot of grabbing and a lot of big bodies being thrown around. How hard was it just to finish a shot? J.P. PRINCE: It was definitely tough to finish down there, but we tried to compete, tried to draw contact. You know, you can't -- the official is either going to call it or not. You've just got to keep playing. We just didn't get stuff to fall. We had a lot of stuff rim out, easy layups and stuff missed. You go in there, you've got to go in there strong and man up. That kind of size, you've got to go in there and just finish. That basically comes down to it. We didn't do a good job of it, and they did. They made big shots when they had to, and we just couldn't get over that hump. SCOTTY HOPSON: I think the same thing. You've just got to finish. They have big strong guys inside, and they rotated over when we started to drive and doubled a lot of us. We've just got to go in there and finish strong and make plays. Q. J.P., this being, I guess, the most lopsided loss Coach Pearl's had, as a senior, what does this do for you heading into the NCAA Tournament? J.P. PRINCE: It's a little motivation. You don't want to be remembered by that performance, of course. So we've just got to wait and see what happens, where we go next, and just come out strong. We just can't have another effort like that because it's just not acceptable. THE MODERATOR: We'll excuse the student-athletes. And we'll continue on with Coach Pearl. Q. Coach, J.P. mentioned the loss of composure. It seemed like, when Wayne got his third foul in the second half, it seemed to snowball from there and a lot of negative energy. Can you talk about that? COACH PEARL: Yeah, we were in foul trouble for a good portion of the game. Brian Williams injured his back and was limited, and so we weren't sure if he was even going to be able to play in the second half. He played, and he did okay. But he's pretty sore right now. Knowing that we were pretty thin on the front line, then we started to get into deeper foul trouble. It became a concern. There was a lot of talking going on, and it was chippy. You know, you like to see both teams play with more composure. Q. Coach, if you could just break down -- I know the players talked a lot about the inside play. But what went wrong? It appeared the first two games for Kentucky you had a pretty good plan. COACH PEARL: They made 8 threes, and in the first couple of games, they did not shoot the ball from three very well. We were able to really limit Cousins' touches. And in this game, he got a lot more touches. And we did a better job on the boards. We had 19 defensive rebounds. They had 14 offensive rebounds. Those ratios did not exist in the first two games. And their second shots and their ability to dominate us physically on the inside. And then obviously the guard play was -- with Wall and Bledsoe, you know, both playing well. Their ball screens against the zone were more effective this time. That bothered us. We're not a zone team. We don't play a lot of zone. But Kentucky is much better against man-to-man defense than they are against zone defense. So therefore, we played a lot of zone, and we're just not -- we played, you know, most of the game zone, and we're not a great zone team. Q. Did the crowd affect your team at all? Was that a factor in this one? COACH PEARL: We had enough fans in there that, when we made our runs, we could hear our people in the building. Certainly, Kentucky enjoys a great home-court advantage, and I think it elevated their play. We had to exert a lot of energy against LSU and Ole Miss, two really good teams, and you needed to be, you know, a little fresher and a little bit more furious to be able to compete with Kentucky. I just thought that, in running our offense, we just -- we got standing around too much. We didn't cut hard. We didn't screen hard. We didn't work hard enough without the basketball, and as a result, they jumped some passing lanes, and we turned the ball over much more in this game. And that was an issue too. We had 15 turnovers in this game, and they converted some of those turnovers into points. Q. Bruce, against a defense as good as Kentucky the way they were playing today, is this a situation where your team suffers for the lack of an offensive player who can really create stuff on his own? COACH PEARL: Yeah, because I would say that, while J.P. can really create, he's very dominant with his left hand, and he's not a good outside shooter. So there's a way to guard him. And then Scotty is a good penetrator, but you can knock him off the ball a little bit, strip and rip him a little bit, and then he's not going to make a lot of plays for anybody else. So J.P. is going to make plays for others, but he can't shoot it. Scotty can make plays for himself, but he's not a play-making player. And against a team like Kentucky, yes, some of that could break it down. We were able to break them down in transition at our place. Melvin Goins, Bobby Maze got to the rim. We got to the rim more. We didn't get to the rim as often in this game. We didn't finish when we got there. Q. Can you elaborate more on the point guard play? It didn't look like either Bobby or Melvin's best game. COACH PEARL: No, we got -- we were 1 for 13 at the position with three assists. So it was a struggle. It was -- but it was a team struggle. But I think we got outplayed at every position. Kentucky is the No. 2 team in the country for a reason. They're a really, really good team, and we just did not have the energy after playing two games and coming back and playing this third game. We just didn't have it. THE MODERATOR: Thank you very much. End of FastScripts |
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