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NCAA MEN'S 2ND & 3RD ROUNDS: DENVERMarch 16, 2011Kyle KuricRick PitinoPeyton SivaDENVER, COLORADO THE MODERATOR: We're joined by Louisville student-athletes. We'll get started with questions for the student-athletes. Q. Kyle, talk about Faried. I know you spent some time playing the four. What have y'all discussed about what you have to do to keep him from going crazy on the glass? KYLE KURIC: We watched a lot of tape on him. He's a great rebounder. We're not going to leave our five man to box him out. It's going to be a group effort, the whole team coming back to keep him low on the rebounds. Q. So much has been made out of the Big East, what a great year it had. Based on your experience playing non-conference teams, how do you think it will translate in the tournament what you went through in your conference schedule? PEYTON SIVA: Just playing non-conference games, you know, you found out a lot of different styles of play. Going into conference styles, also the same thing, playing against zones and man-to-man. I think both really help us out when we go out of conference again to the tournament, it's going to help us out with different styles of play, you know. Just being prepared for scouting reports, that really helped us out throughout the year. Q. Preston and George are the only players who really had experienced the Elite 8 and the big success in this tournament. Are the rest of you guys hungry for that? KYLE KURIC: We've thought about it. But like all the past games, we're not focused on two or three games ahead, we're focused on playing Morehead State. After that game we'll start looking forward to it. I was on the team. I didn't play much. We're hungry to get farther than we did last year, get another ring, get something. PEYTON SIVA: Like he said, we're focused on Morehead State. You can't overlook them. They rebound the ball, they get after you, are aggressive on defense. We just have to continue to play hard, take it one game at a time. That's what we've been doing pretty much the whole year, taking it one game at a time, not looking forward to anybody else. Q. Peyton, can you talk about the defensive improvement of this team and maybe your defensive improvement, too, but the way it's grown over the course of the season. PEYTON SIVA: I think our defensive effort is really picking up at the end of the games. We really need to change that. We need to get out to a quicker start rather than trying to catch up with everybody, trying to make comebacks. But I feel that our team is really focused in. Everybody has been really paying attention to scouting reports and digging in on defense. Lately we've been hitting the glass. That's been one of our Achille's heels. I think we've been doing a lot better job, we're reading our rotation, and knowing where we're supposed to be at at all times on the court. Q. Peyton, are you using the championship game as motivation? I know you've been used to moving on, but that may have been a little bit different. PEYTON SIVA: It definitely was hard losing that game. The good thing about the Big East tournament is we survived it. We have a second chance at life basically. That one's behind us, over and done with. We basically start our season here. We take it one game at a time. When you come here, if you lose, you're out. If you win, you keep going. There's no time to dwell on the Big East championship. We have to keep moving forward and learn from our mistakes that we had. Q. Kyle, you were on the team that played Morehead a couple years ago. Peyton, you weren't around yet. Have the guys who played against Morehead, might know more about them, kind of warning the guys who weren't around that these guys are pretty good? KYLE KURIC: I mean, just from seeing from the film, we can tell that. PK played a lot more in the game like that. He's telling us all we can't take them lightly. We wouldn't do that anyway. Watching the film, we get a good sense of how they play, the style that they play. By doing that, we focus more on how we can stop them and take advantage of their weaknesses. PEYTON SIVA: I really don't know too much about Morehead besides film work. We know they got talented players. Coach P talks a lot about them. PK told us that they're going to come out aggressive, come out strong. We just got to come out and match their intensity, go out there and play our game, don't try to change anything. Q. Have you noticed a change in PK? He's been pretty intense all year, but now that he's coming towards the end of his college career, has he brought it up another level? KYLE KURIC: Like you said, PK has brought it every game since the start. Now that we are getting deeper and deeper into his final season, he is being a lot more vocal, he's getting guys, making sure they're in the right spots. He's being a lot more aggressive in making sure that we win and move forward. PEYTON SIVA: Preston has really been stepping it up a lot lately. You see him moving more towards the one, the backup one. He's been aggressive. That's the way he plays, that's his style of play. One thing about him is he never takes a day off. He always comes to practice hard and practice hard every game. In the game, he translates from practice to the game, goes hard every day. Know one thing about Preston, he's never going to give up. We've been really following his lead on that. THE MODERATOR: We'll go ahead and dismiss you guys. We're joined now by Louisville head coach, Rick Pitino. Coach, if you want to just start with some general comments, then we'll open it up for questions. COACH PITINO: Well, we're very excited to be part of the tournament. Our guys have worked extremely hard, as hard as any team I've ever coached, to get to this point. I know they're very excited to be part of it. It's a special time of year for the entire country that follows college basketball. So we're ready to go and anxious to go. THE MODERATOR: We'll open it up for questions. Q. Are you personally more excited this year than last year? Every season is different. You seem to enjoy this team so much. COACH PITINO: It's true, I enjoy this team. I'm not more excited than any year. Anytime you're part of the tournament, you get excited about it. I think this year's team has paid the price. Really, they've had to fight every single day to not only get better. Every game we've played this year, we've had to come back, hold serve to win it. We've played a lot of close, hard-fought ballgames. That's what this team has had to go through to reach this point. We finished the season No. 11 in the country. We finished the season playing in the Big East championship game. We finished the season a 4 seed and we're really, really proud of all those accomplishments. Q. What frustrates you more over the course of your coaching career, a big man who won't play like a big man or a point guard who won't distribute? COACH PITINO: You're not talking about my team. Q. I would never. COACH PITINO: Okay (smiling). That's a great question. Because you run into it so much, big guys don't want to do what's going to make them great players. That's my admiration for this young man Faried. You know, you don't see this anymore. You don't see a Dennis Rodman come along anymore, a Dennis Rodman with a jump shot, because this man has a jump shot. That's one of the highest compliments because I'm a big Rodman fan from my NBA days. A guy who gets around, never let's you catch the ball in the post, shot blocker, great defender, draws the charge, is the leading rebounder in the history of the game. Here is a young man who really understands where his bread is buttered. Most bigs don't understand that. Point guards don't understand what people are looking for. First, we can't find point guards anymore. We call them combo guards because they want to score first. So it is frustrating, but the great thing about it is when you do find one of those guys, in our situation we recruited a combo guard who had to learn to play the point and he has learned and we're very excited about that, in Peyton Siva. Q. I guess there's maybe a couple of reasons you might talk not so glowingly about your team at the beginning of the season. Maybe one is because you truly believe it. Two, you might be trying to tone down expectations. Three, maybe you're trying to send a message to your players or light a fire. I was wondering if there was a blend, all of one? COACH PITINO: Really wasn't. I really had no motive behind it. I didn't call it a rebuilding year, I called it a bridge year. We had only one returning starter. We thought we'd get him back in November or December, Jared Swopshire. He went out, had a sports hernia. He went out for the season. We didn't have a lot of experience returning. We were picked 8 in the Big East. Didn't know what to expect. Didn't know if we'd have a great attitude, where our defense would come by. I called it a bridge year saying we were going to build to something special, I just don't know when the bridge will be complete. It was not motivation. I knew I had great guys who were going to work extremely hard. The only motivation I had was just to get the guys to understand that we can't look ahead at all, we just got to take care of today to become a good basketball team. Q. You said a couple times this year that you're a good basketball team when you defend the glass. Does Faried remind you of anyone not named Rodman, someone in the college game? What is the concern level about what you can do to you inside? COACH PITINO: No, he doesn't remind me of anybody in college. I don't think we have anybody like him in college basketball because he rebounds with great quickness. He's not an Oakley/Buck Williams rebounder. He's a Rodman/Garnett rebounder. He rebounds with quickness, relentless pursuit. He has three techniques he uses to rebound. Because my son coaches at Florida, my stepson Billy Donovan is the head coach, I was interested, because they have one of the best front lines in basketball. I watched that game without keeping a stat sheet in front of me. I called my son immediately. He said, Dad, that was my scout. It was life and death at the end. They won by six. I said, How many rebounds did he end up with? Because Florida's front court is all seniors, and they're very big, Tyus, their center, and Chandler Parsons. I said, How many rebounds did he have? Figuring that they would hold him to 8 to 12, and he had 18. He is special, a special guy. The reason I think he'll be a high draft choice is, the NBA is in dire need of a guy like this who goes after every basketball. I've always felt that the young man from Carolina would be a terrific player in the pros because he had that relentless pursuit of the basketball as well, not with this quickness, but more with strength. But you can't find guys like him anymore today. He's so out of the norm. Q. Could you talk about what you've gotten from Chris Smith this season and also touch on working with his brother JR over the summer. COACH PITINO: I recruited JR in high school. He actually committed to me as a sophomore, then committed to Carolina later on. Didn't go to college. But JR, what I was surprised most about is how hard JR worked with individual workouts. I was shocked how hard he got after it. It was great for our players to see that. Chris isn't like JR. He's only 6'2". He works extremely hard. He's a good athlete. Very strong. Good shooter from the outside. He's had a very good season, very solid season. Q. We were talking to Kyle and Peyton before. They both were saying that Preston has just raised his intensity level, which is saying something. Have you noticed something? Is this something you've been pushing or is he just doing this because he sees a light at the end? COACH PITINO: We're watching it. Today he was hitting people for rebounds. I cut practice short because I was afraid we were going to have another injury because he's very, very intense right now, very wound up. So, yes, he's picking up his level. It's quite noticeable. Q. There's Jimmer-mania this week in Denver. Since you shut him out his freshman year, he's come out. Have you peeked in on his game from where you were? COACH PITINO: When did I shut him out? Q. Freshman year, didn't he not score in his freshman year? COACH PITINO: I'm sorry? Anybody remember that? Did we shut him out? I don't remember shutting him out. Maybe we did. We lost that game, didn't we? Q. Yes. 78-76. COACH PITINO: I forget all losses (smiling). If we would have won, we definitely shut him out (laughter). Q. Anyway, if you could talk about his game. COACH PITINO: You know, a good friend of mine was working out at the New York Athletic Club last year. I guess Jimmer was there with his dad for some reason. They were working out, because he's from New York. Went up to him. He said, Do you play ball? He said, Yeah, I play basketball. He said, Good, I watched workout. He didn't know who he was, my friend. The young man was so humble. He was saying, We're hoping to have a good year. Everything is going well. Where you from? He told him, New York. He said, Great. He came back and told me the story. I obviously watched him a lot this year on television, big fan of his. He is a young man that really understands how to play the game. He's really very difficult to stop because he's so crafty and uses both hands so well, has great range. And he's very difficult to stop. They're not playing great basketball right now, but they could get it back. Anytime you lose a key player, you have a drop-off, then you got to find out where you're going to make up for it. He's so exciting, so much fun to watch, that college basketball has been taken by him. You don't know how he's going to score because he's so crafty. I don't remember anything about him playing at BYU at that time. But I've followed him all this year and he's just a tremendous basketball player. Q. So much ado about the Big East this season, the unprecedented physicality, the unprecedented 11 teams. Do you think the things that Big East teams learn in conference play will project out into this tournament to help them? COACH PITINO: I really don't. I don't think it's a factor either way. I think great competition helps you get better certainly. I think the Big East is mentally tough, there's no question about it. I think most of the teams are physically tough. They, without question, deserve to get all 11 teams in this year. It's not as significant as you may think. The size of this conference is massive. Now we're even getting bigger with Texas Christian joining us. All the teams are very, very good. The team we're playing reminds me of a hybrid of Villanova and Marquette. Morehead, they're very similar to the way they play. But the Big East, it wouldn't surprise me to see everybody advance, wouldn't surprise me to see three or four teams lose - I hope we're not one of them. It's no help playing in that. I think Connecticut and us went through a meat grinder at the end of the year a little bit. They played five games, we played three games at 9:30 in the evening, got in really late. Since then, we have gotten our rest and are over that. The other teams will benefit from an early exit, meaning Pittsburgh and Syracuse, teams that can go far in this tournament. Q. Coach Tyndall from Morehead was in earlier talking about your defense, talked some about your zone. He said he was impressed with your man-to-man. Talk about how the defense has progressed this season, maybe how guys have become better individual defenders as well. COACH PITINO: Well, we're really not good individual defenders. What this team has is an ability to focus in on the other team's strengths and weaknesses and study it as great students. Our guys on a ball-containment, on a block-out situation, they're not very good. I wouldn't even put them in my top-10 teams I've coached. But in terms of focusing in on what they have to do to stop an opponent, study an opponent, they study like coaches study. I think that's what's made us strong this year, is the fact that they all really, really focus in. It's from Preston Knowles who really sets the tone about paying attention to all little things. That's what this team does. That's why they're a good defensive team. Q. You started off by talking about how you had to fight every day. Was there ever a point that you felt like this team had kind of turned the corner? COACH PITINO: Pretty much that, because we were always fighting an injury, every day was either a concussion, a sprain. These injuries that we've had, Gorgui missed six weeks of practice. Guys have missed an average of a month on our basketball team. We've had seven concussions. We've had ACLs. We've had sprains. We've had torn meniscuses on our team. We never knew where we were going to stand. We were trying to patch a team together to play the next game. We never had any expectations; we were just trying to win the next game. The only thing that's been difficult, so enjoyable but difficult, is we're very small. I don't think small teams can be great defensive teams unless they pay attention. We're starting 6', 6', 6'2", 6'4", 6'5", 6'9". With that little length, you have to do it with your mental capabilities as much as your physical capabilities, and that's what this team has done. THE MODERATOR: Coach, thanks very much. Good luck tomorrow. COACH PITINO: Thank you. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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