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NCAA MEN'S 1ST & 2ND ROUNDS: NEW ORLEANSMarch 18, 2010Al-Farouq AminuDino GaudioIshmael SmithNEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA Wake Forest – 81 MODERATOR: Coach, opening comments. COACH GAUDIO: I thought it was a great college basketball game. I thought Texas played very, very hard. Rick should be really proud of his kids. I'm proud of our kids. You know, we're down 8 in overtime. It was our fifth overtime game this season. I think when you have four seniors that have been through the wars a little bit, I think that bodes well for you as a coach. Even when we were down 8 after one of the timeouts, they had their heads high, they believed they could win. It was a really good, obviously, win for us. I thought a little bit of difference in the game was the backboard. We came into the game knowing that we had to box out. It was a big key to the game. Before the game they said, What are the three keys to the game? I said, Rebounding, rebounding, and rebounding. I think the other big key to the game for us was we did a much better job in the second half guarding the three-point line. We're not the prettiest team in the world. We don't shoot the ball straight a lot of times, but our defense was the difference in the basketball game as was the backboard. So we live to fight another day. Q. Questions for the student-athletes? MODERATOR: Questions for the student-athletes. Q. Can you just walk us through the last shot? ISHMAEL SMITH: Well, first of all, Coach came over and talked to me. He said, If he makes both free throws, we need a three. He said, If he misses one, makes one, then we need a two. Take it all the way. I felt like the second part of the second half Texas did a great job of keeping me out of the lane. As far as not getting all the way to the line, I'm sorry. So I knew I wasn't going to get all the way to the lane. I knew I had to pull up. And thank God I made a big shot. Like Coach said, we live to play another day. Q. You've had plenty of games in your time here, and you've hit a bunch of shots like this one. Where is this game and where does that shot rank? ISHMAEL SMITH: This has to be number one, obviously. Because I think in the regular season you live to play another game. Now you're in a position you lose, you go home. So this is probably number one. And we'll celebrate tonight, but then we've got to get ready for a really, really good team, really good Kentucky team, I'm sorry. Q. This was one of your best games in a while. What did you do differently to kind of break out of the slump? AL-FAROUQ AMINU: I just tried to play real hard. I don't worry about myself offensively or anything like that. I just wanted to win so bad for the seniors and everything like that. So I think any time I play hard and play smart, I'm going to end up on the good side of the ball. Q. Coach said nobody's heads were down when you were down 8 in the overtime, but there was a timeout called. What did you guys talk about right there in that one? ISHMAEL SMITH: We just talked about just getting stops. That's the biggest thing. When you get down 8, usually when you watch overtime games, when a team usually gets down by 4 or more points, they kind of cave in. They start looking at the clock, and the clock starts ticking down. They start feeling sorry for themselves. But what we did was, like Coach said, we've just got to keep getting stops. Keep getting stops. And we did. We came up with the big win. Q. With a win like this, can this kind of jump start you guys for the tournament and kind of break you out of where you were struggling at the end? AL-FAROUQ AMINU: Yeah, definitely it can. You know, we lost like 5 out of 6 at the end. But everybody knows that we can play, and this is going to give us confidence, and hopefully we can carry it on to the next game. MODERATOR: Questions for Coach Gaudio. Q. You guys were up 11 in the first half, 12 in the second half. You turned the ball over on an inbounds play and you're down 8-0 in overtime. As a coach can you listen to that stuff and reconcile that with the fact that your team was able to come back in all those situations and win that game? COACH GAUDIO: You know, what I kept referring to in the overtime was the prior four overtime games that we had had. And we just found a way to gut them out. When we were down 8, there was plenty of time, you know. There's three-plus on the clock. We just kept telling them there's plenty of time. Let's just get stops. Let our defense create a little bit of offense for ourselves, and it did. And Ari Stewart hit a big three, which was huge for us. Got us a little bit of a momentum swing back in the game. We were fortunate that one of their young guys missed a free throw or a couple of them, and it gave us a little bit of life. But when we had had the lead, we squandered it a little bit with our turnovers. We turned the ball over a little bit too much. I think when we grabbed the one rebound, I think it was L.D., with a minute and 7 or something, and we tried to throw the long pass to C.J. down the floor, that was ill-advised. I think if we had just possessed the ball, they would have had to foul us. But, like I said, you play five overtime games against some really good teams, Xavier, Richmond, Maryland, Virginia, and Texas, and somehow win all of those, I think it reveals the character of the kids on the team. Q. It looked like that was designed to get Brown to give the ball up in that last sequence after the three-pointer. Did the kids do that on their own? Did you tell them to do that? Did it just work out that way? COACH GAUDIO: I'm not sure what Rick was doing. We were just face-guard floating and trying to deny the inbounds. Is that the possession you're referring to? Q. The last possession -- COACH GAUDIO: When we fouled? Q. Yeah, you were intending to foul, but what happened was Brown got the ball, you double teamed him and did not foul him -- COACH GAUDIO: No, we were supposed to, as soon as it came in, foul. That's exactly what we were supposed to foul. And Farouq came over and trapped. Why we didn't foul initially J'Covan, I'm not sure. But when they threw it out, we then made that foul on the sideline away from our bench. But, no, we were supposed to foul him initially. As soon as it came in, we were going to. Q. I know you've been preparing for Texas and looking at them a lot, and now you have to face a Kentucky team. What do you know about Kentucky and what opportunities does that provide for you? COACH GAUDIO: What we did coming into the tournament -- and we always do this, Coach Battle had the Texas scout, Coach Wojcik had the Kentucky scout, so when our name came up on the board and we saw it was in the other bracket, Coach LaRue had East Tennessee State in the event that that would have happened. So Coach Wojcik has been since day one Sunday night when we saw we were playing Texas, he's been preparing for Kentucky. I have not seen one second of Kentucky tape. We'll see a lot of it between now and daybreak tomorrow. But, you know, John's a good friend. He was always close with Skip. Two Pittsburgh guys. You know, I have great respect for him. He's a smart guy. Because I think his daughter's in medical school at Wake Forest. But it will be a challenge. You know, John we know real well. John Wall's a North Carolina kid. We saw him play eight gazillion times when he was in high school, and he was playing with D-One Sports AAU team, which is a Carolina AAU team. They're just really, really good. They're very well coached. And it will be a challenge for us. Q. Both on the last possession of regulation and the last couple of possessions of overtime you were kind of bringing the ball up in a hurry and you elected not to call timeout. What went into that decision? COACH GAUDIO: We always want to attack the basket while they're in transition. When they went to the free-throw line at the end, I told Ishmael, if we're up two or one, I just want you to attack the basket. I don't want to give them a chance to get set. Now if we had gone down three, I wanted him to cross the timeline, and we were going to try to run a play where we needed a three-point shot. But that was our mindset. It's always been that way. It's our philosophy. Attack them in transition while they're a little bit scrambled. And there's no one else I'd rather take that shot. When you look at Ishmael's stats, look at his ACC three-point shooting stats, oh, not very good. When you look at his free throws, not very good. But he makes -- that kid makes big shots. As a sophomore he hit a game winner against Virginia Tech. He hit a game winner against Miami. When we were in overtime against Xavier, he made three straight threes. If I took that little guy out there right now, he wouldn't make three straight threes. If he shot 100 of them. But he makes big shots. Makes big free throws. He's a lion. This team is led by a tough son of a gun at the point guard. He plays hard. I mean, how many rebounds did he pull down tonight? A dozen. From the point guard spot? Big rebounds. Plays hard. Plays hard. Thanks very much. End of FastScripts |
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