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NCAA MEN'S REGIONAL SEMIFINALS & FINALS: SYRACUSEMarch 27, 2010Da'Sean ButlerDevin EbanksBob HugginsKevin JonesJoe MazzullaSYRACUSE, NEW YORK West Virginia – 73 THE MODERATOR: Congratulations, guys. Thanks for coming in. We will start with questions for the student-athletes first. Begin right down here in front. Q. Devin, congratulations. You threw the basketball into the stands at the end and you jumped up on the table there. Talk about what you're thinking there. And also you said before you considered playing for Coach Calipari. Is it kind of ironic that you win this game against him? DEVIN EBANKS: I jumped on the table. The Final Four, we've got two more games to win. That's been our motto. Not to get happy after you win the game. We still have two more to go. Yeah, it was pretty ironic playing against Calipari. Playing against a very talented Kentucky team. They played hard, but we came out on the winning side today. Q. Da'Sean, I was wondering, you always talk about your motivation, what was the motivation for this one? DeMARCUS COUSINS: 49 states picked us to lose. Obviously we wanted to make everybody upset. We went out there and played our game. We grinded it out. We won. I knew we were going to win. Everybody up here knew we were going to win. It was a matter of how we were going to do it. And they outrebounded us and we just did everything possibly to win the game. Still we find a way. Q. For Da'Sean and Joe: When Huggs gave his little speech after the trophy ceremony, he said, "Let's go win two more," what did you think when you heard that at that moment? Just talk about the mentality of that thought that your coach is doing that and not really celebrating this as much. JOE MAZZULLA: That's just the attitude that Huggs has instilled in us. He told us in the locker room not to be complacent. We didn't come here to make it to the Final Four and lay it down. We just have to enjoy it the rest of the night and have the mindset that we have 80 minutes left to really do something special. We can enjoy it. But we don't want to lose track of what our main goal is. DA'SEAN BUTLER: Obviously, it's something we've been preaching. Not even just two more. Ever since we won our first game. Five more, four more, three more. We're not satisfied. We can't be happy just being there, the Final Four. It doesn't mean anything unless you win the whole thing. Everything is in vain unless you win the whole thing. We just try to do that. Q. Joe, was it that three-pointer that got you going? Was it just the way the game was going? Did you see this coming? JOE MAZZULLA: Yeah. I've been able to read minds maybe the last three or four months. (Laughter). No, I mean, I've been shooting the ball really well in practice. It was only a matter of time before I actually hit one. I think my biggest problem was just kind of hesitating. When I saw John going under the screen I saw it was a perfect opportunity. I got nothing to lose. The worst thing that happens is I go sit next to Huggs for a little while. Q. Did that kind of jump-start your whole game? JOE MAZZULLA: Yeah, I mean. It's always easier when you hit your first shot. You go out there and clank your first one off the front of the rim, you start to feel a little uncomfortable and a little hesitant. Making your first shot just kind of makes the game go that much easier. Q. Da'Sean, that first half, just to me, it just seemed like you guys were playing a style that was taught by a former coach with all the threes and the 1-3-1. Can you just talk about how that first half went. You guys hit a lot of threes, no twos in the first half. DA'SEAN BUTLER: They did a really good job every time we drove to the basket they blocked every shot and took the ball out of our hands. We weren't playing strong in the interior inside the three-point line that first five. But as far as making the shots, just passed the ball around, we found each other, found Kevin a lot, my teammates found me. Especially Joe. So, you know, we just stepped in and knocked down shots. Q. Joe, can you talk about your perseverance coming back from shoulder injury, shoulder surgery, shooting foul shots with your opposite hand earlier this year, and being back-up point guard and now suddenly being MVP of this game. JOE MAZZULLA: I've said it before, the other people to the right of me as well as everyone else in the locker room, they never gave up on me. It was easy for Huggs to kind of send me to the end of the bench and wait until I was healthy. He still kept me in the game. He still gave me a role. That kind of helped my perseverance. It's just like I said, the support of everyone around me has helped me get to here. Q. For Kevin and Devin, Da'Sean: Obviously you guys did this for West Virginia, but you're all from New York, New Jersey. Can you just talk about doing it also to represent the New York area. And I guess you have a lot of family and friends come up to the game. Talk about that. KEVIN JONES: There's just something about New York. We haven't lost here all year. It's very special doing it in front of all your friends and family watching. Like you said, we definitely did it for the state of West Virginia. We're going to come back to West Virginia and enjoy it. But not for too long. We still have another mission - the national championship. DA'SEAN BUTLER: Definitely it feels good to win it for West Virginia especially. But it definitely feels good and hopefully everybody can see it from back home, if you get the right people around you and do whatever you can do, stay focused and take care of yourself. From Newark, New Jersey, you can do anything pretty much. Just a matter of just having good people around you. When you get there, you have a great coach and great teammates. So everything just went in my favor. So I'm just lucky. Q. For Joe and Da'Sean: Calipari was in here talking about how their guys didn't handle things very well. Again, the way you guys play and the style and the physicality. What specifically is it that wears teams down and how much do you guys feed off of that when you see it happening? JOE MAZZULLA: I think our offensive execution really wears teams down. We're at our worst when we take forced shots and when we don't execute. When we kind of force John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins to kind of come off screens and to kind of chase us, I just think it wears them down and gets them tired. We didn't give them any easy looks at the basket either. I thought the 1-3-1 was a lot more physical than we've played in the past. DA'SEAN BUTLER: Yeah, the way we played defensively, we made it very difficult for them to see open cutters and just make plays in general. And then you go offense, I won't want to say we beat them up on defense, but we play very physical and you get on offense and we run so much, setting screens, curling screens and all that, it kind of wears people out. We're used to doing it obviously. So it's very hard to guard. Q. A couple for Joe: How is the necklace? How does it feel? JOE MAZZULLA: I mean, it's great. It's a great feeling to have. I said our motto -- an opportunity for kids to fulfill their dreams. And we've done one of them and we have two more games to fulfill our highest dream. Q. I asked these guys about New York, what kind of party is going on in Rhode Island right now? JOE MAZZULLA: I don't know. It's just great to be a great representative of Rhode Island. I kind of feel like a West Virginian, too, because of how much they support you and stuff like that. As much as I did it for Rhode Island, it's just as important for West Virginia. THE MODERATOR: OK, guys. Thank you. We'll let you go. Congratulations. Good luck, next weekend. Questions for Coach Huggins. Q. Bob, what do you think Coach McCluskey would say about you making the Final Four playing almost 40 minutes of zone? COACH BOB HUGGINS: You know, Coach Mac did play that 1-1-3. I think Coach Mac is looking down on us, he's very happy right now. He was like my grandfather. I was very, very close to him. Q. Bob, you played the zone right away, then you went to the man. Do you figure out there that maybe Ebanks couldn't guard Wall? Or you went back to the zone. Were you trying to show him different things there then? COACH BOB HUGGINS: Well, we came in thinking that we would change defenses on them. Try to keep them off balance. I don't know, maybe halfway through the first half it seemed like the 1-3-1 was better. So we were going to ride that as long as we could ride it. We almost changed to playing match-up. But I said let's give it another -- we need to get a stop when they were making a run. And we were very fortunate to get a stop. So we stayed with it. Q. What are your thoughts on being the last BIG EAST standing and kind of getting them to the Final Four on a BIG EAST court? COACH BOB HUGGINS: Well, we're obviously very proud to represent the BIG EAST. It's a phenomenal basketball conference with great coaches and great players. You know, we've kind of rallied around each other in the locker room. These guys have kind of been on a mission to -- I talked to them about trying to be special. If we can somehow find a way to win a couple more, that will be really special. Q. At the beginning of the season, Bob, did you think this was the team that would get you back to the Final Four? Did you think this team had 30 wins in it? COACH BOB HUGGINS: I thought we had a chance, in all honesty. Joe had a terrible relapse. Joe was shooting the ball really well. And then I think he got hit. So he had a relapse. And so he ended up playing with one arm for a while. And Devin hurt his hand. Dev is still not shooting the ball as well as he shot the ball in pre-season. In fact, he's not shooting very well at all, but I think -- they're great kids. That's the one thing I think that you can -- we can always hang our hat on. They're going to try to do the best they possibly can. It took a while for us to find our roles. It certainly took a while for us to get to where we needed to be defensively. Probably longer than what I expected. But I'd go in the locker room and say, you know, I'm not very happy with this or this or this, but the reality is we've just won our 26th game or our 27th or 25th or whatever it is. We're going to keep trying to win a few more here. Q. With regard to the offensive execution the guys were talking about, shot selection has become pretty significant I would imagine. You guys don't seem to force anything. Is there way for you to get what you want? COACH BOB HUGGINS: It's hard when you're playing the teams that we've played. When you play Missouri, when you play Washington, when you play Kentucky, because they're so good in transition. And if you take bad shots, you just fuel that transition. So we wanted to do a good job with shot selection, particularly in those three games, to make sure we could get back and make them guard us where we could team guard them. And I think our guys have done a pretty good job. And I think what they're talking about is, I talked to them all the time, we have to grind it. We're not as good in the first half as we were in the second half because people get tired of chasing it. They get tired of chasing it. They get tired of being screened. They get tired of chasing those curls. And we got more things -- we got nothing at the rim in the first half. We got a lot of things at the rim in the second half. And when you think that Da'Sean has 15 the first half, and I don't think he scored a point until inside maybe the 2:00 mark of the second half. And our other guys were able to score the ball. In all honesty, it was a little frustrating in the first half because every time we seemed like we got it to the basket, they did a great job of closing, getting to the ball, and changed our shot or blocked our shot. We ran three sets. We ran three sets coming out of the time-out, two for Da'Sean and one for Kevin. And we hit threes on all three sets, which kind of got us going a little bit. Q. Bob, talk about making shots today. You've been talking for weeks, months, maybe about really not making shots. And you finally really get going here from three. COACH BOB HUGGINS: During the time-out, actually Larry (Harrison) wanted to run the set for Da'Sean. And he looked at Da and said, "We need you to make a shot." Da said, "I got it." And so he came, he made that shot. And then I wanted to run the set for K.J. We ran a set for K.J. and he made a three. And we ran the same thing for Da and he made another three. And then we ran the same thing for K.J. Again and he really got a good look. They ran at him, and I think he missed a 10- or 12-footer. But we had to run sets because we couldn't get anything at the rim. Q. Bob, will you just talk about the confidence that your team has - West Virginia hasn't won a lot of BIG EAST championships but these guys thought they could win it. Haven't been to any Final Fours. They obviously believe they can win it. These guys believe they are capable of big things - and where that comes from. COACH BOB HUGGINS: Well, I think the first day I was there I told them I came back to win a national championship. I came back to win it for the university, having played there and for the great people in our state. And it's going to take a lot of work. And I said this many times, the wonderful thing about these guys is they have never -- they never doubt. They never ask why. They never kind of bucked it. They just said OK, that's what we have to do. We're going to go do it. And they've done it and done with it great enthusiasm and great vigor. And they deserve all the credit for it. They're really good guys. And you go recruit guys, and I told all the guys I recruited, we want to win a national championship. We need you to be a piece of what we want to do. If I don't believe it, how are they supposed to believe it? We've played so many close games because that's what we are. I wish we could go blow somebody out by 20 and I could kind of sit down once in a while and talk to Billy (Hahn) and Larry. But that's not the make-up of our team. We're not a real explosive offensive team. So we're going to play everything close. But I think in some ways that's helped us, because we're so used to being in close games. Q. Will you talk about the make-up of Mazzulla and what he's been through, how his personality has allowed him to maybe change his off-the-court antics and continue to grow as a player while being injured. COACH BOB HUGGINS: It's hard. I've said this before, he didn't know if he would ever play again. They had never done that surgery on a basketball player. Everybody that our medical staff talked to said, if you -- I mean, including the guys that are the foremost authorities on those kind of things in the country, and they all said, if you could avoid surgery, avoid surgery. Obviously we couldn't do that. And Joe worked really hard. And I think -- and we tried to talk to him a lot. Actually, he came in one day and he had tears in his eyes. He said, "Huggs, what am I going to do if I can't play?" I said, "You told me you're the best soccer player in Rhode Island, maybe you can go play for Marlon (Leblanc)." Don't know. He's been good about really working hard at it. He's not one of those guys that got frustrated with the rehab. Now he and I had a long talk I think at halftime of the Cincinnati game because I think he was just -- he was just kind of out there. He didn't play with -- if Joe doesn't play with great enthusiasm, he's not very good. That's what kind of puts him over the top. And I think since then he's played with great enthusiasm. But you know you get to where -- particularly with him, because he was playing with one arm for so long in the season. And I couldn't play him much after the ten-minute mark of the second half, because they were going to foul him. We played Truck so much more. And then as he got healthy, he didn't shoot a shot with his left hand until probably maybe a month, three weeks to a month ago. He's shooting the ball really well now. He's shooting the ball extremely well. In practice, he really makes shots. And I told him -- he turned down a shot today. I said, "Will you shoot the ball?" Because he took one three or four games ago that he shouldn't have taken. It wasn't that I didn't want him shooting, I didn't want anyone shooting it at that time. He gets, if you don't want me to shoot, I won't shoot. And it's not that at all. So I told him today, "Will you please shoot the ball when they don't guard you." He's got to. And on top of that, he's really made shots in practice. THE MODERATOR: That's all the time we have. Coach, thank you very much. Congratulations. COACH BOB HUGGINS: Thank you very much. End of FastScripts |
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