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SOUTHEASTERN CONFERENCE MEN'S TOURNAMENTMarch 8, 2012Murphy HollowayAndy KennedyNick WilliamsNEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA Ole Miss – 68 CLAUDE FELTON: Okay. We have Ole Miss head Coach Andy Kennedy and student‑athletes Murphy Holloway and Nick Williams.  We'll take an opening statement from coach and then take questions for the student‑athletes. COACH KENNEDY: Yeah, proud of my guys, we won in typical Ole Miss fashion, it was a grind. Every game is. We did a lot of things that we're going to have to improve upon tomorrow night in order for us to advance. But the one area that allowed us to win the game was we were dominant on the glass. We had 19 offensive rebounds and we were plus‑14, did a good job with second chance points. I thought Murph was tremendous early, had a double‑double at the half. And Nick really carried us offensively in the second half, which allowed us to get the separation we needed to advance. CLAUDE FELTON: We'll take your questions for the student‑athletes. Q. Talk about your game, you missed your first couple, but then really got into a groove there. NICK WILLIAMS: I was nervous, man. I was real nervous. You could tell by the first shot, I shot it over the rim. But I settled down, got some easy buckets, and it went from there. Q. Along the same lines, it seemed like you guys were able to get a lot of points off of screens, got a lot of easy looks. Did you guys see that during the scouting report and everything? NICK WILLIAMS: Yeah, they played us tough in the first half. Second half, they came out and made a run. We got in the huddle and coach just challenged us. He asked somebody to make a play. And A.J. came in and got a big rebound and kicked it out to me for an open shot, and I just think that that's what turned the game. Q. Murph, in the first half, Auburn had 10 fouls before you guys were called for a foul. Were you all aware that things were kind of going your way in the flow at that time? It was surprising to see. MURPHY HOLLOWAY: They was fouling us. (Laughter.) No way around it. They were fouling us. But it was going our way. And we came out with the win. Q. For Nick. Nick, when you get your shot going like that, it seems like you just sprint to the screens like you just can't wait to get to them. Can you just talk about when you know you got it going because you really go to the screens hard. It's almost like, you know, I can't wait to get the ball in my hands. NICK WILLIAMS: They were just teasing me about it. It's like they never seen me run that fast before. But guys, Demarco, Reg, Murph, they were setting good screens and getting me open. And coach wanted me to shoot. I felt like I was in a rhythm and I made a couple moves and got some easy looks. Q. I had a question for Murphy. It looked like your positioning on some of the rebounding that kind of helped you out in the first half and not drawing fouls, drawing fouls from them and not committing fouls. Does that make sense. It looked like that, I guess, that discipline sort of came into play early. MURPHY HOLLOWAY: When the shot go up, coach always tells us to get opposite, and they missed most of the balls opposite and I was right there to get them. Q. Nick, 22 points I believe is your career high if I'm not mistaken. What does it mean to get it in a game against a team from your home state? And I know coach has been talking to you, we talked earlier about being more aggressive. Are you still having to tell yourself that now? It looked like it was second nature. NICK WILLIAMS: I had an open shot in the first half and they was screaming at me, Don't shoot it. I passed it back to Jarvis. But you just got to stay aggressive. I can't get down on missed shots and I had some easy ones early and I missed them. I got some in the second half and I knocked them down. So I just got to keep pushing. The team needs me to score the ball, and so that's what I did. Q. You may have answered this just a minute ago, but you had six offensive rebounds in the game. What's the knack on the offensive board getting the ball? MURPHY HOLLOWAY: I think it's just God given. Just knowing where the ball is going to ‑‑ just have a knack for the ball, knowing where it's going to come off at. And that's about it.  There ain't no formula to it. (Laughter.) Q. In that second half, it seemed like every time Auburn made a push, you were the one to answer, was that something you were thinking about every time it got close, and what was your mindset as that second half wore on? NICK WILLIAMS: Even if I wasn't thinking about it, coach is in my ear screaming at me saying, Go up and get the ball or whatever. Make a play. So I just did what I had to do. Lucky some shots fell for me and I got on a roll. So we just got to carry this momentum into tomorrow. Q. Talk about tomorrow's matchup and specifically the inside battle that Coach Barbee thinks it's probably going to be inside the paint there. MURPHY HOLLOWAY: It's going to be tough, man. Last game I think they outplayed us down low, and we owe them. That's all I can say. Q. Did you read the point shaving, the alleged point shaving story or see the coverage? I'm wondering what your reaction was to that. COACH KENNEDY: About through the second half, I thought that Terrance had joined them, joined the scam. (Laughter.) MURPHY HOLLOWAY: We heard about it. Man, we didn't really read a lot into it, but we heard about it. I know Varez pretty well, but I don't really know too much what's going on. CLAUDE FELTON: We'll excuse the student‑athletes and take questions for coach. Q. Murphy 10 points, 10 rebounds in that first half. How much did that help you guys get off to a good start? COACH KENNEDY: Well, we were struggling with our first‑shot offense early. Nick alluded to the fact that it may have been nerves. It may have just been overly excited because of the game and the importance of the game. And the only way that we were scoring was off second chance points. And really there's many times that people would say that our best offense is a missed shot. That's what we do. And when we have had success, now having won four straight, that's really been the formula: make timely shots. Obviously Nick really got going for us in the second half and knocked down some big jump shots. But early on, the reason that we were in the lead was the fact that we were pursuing the ball off the offensive glass. Murph with a big six. I thought Reg was very active early and it allowed to us stay in the game until we were able to string together some good offensive possessions. Q. I would like to ask you the same question I asked Murphy about, just the knack for getting offensive rebounds. Is it just getting on the opposite side of the rim from where the shot's taken or what goes into that? COACH KENNEDY: Well I think that he was very candid. I think he does have a nose for the ball, literally. Certain guys seem to be around the ball. He's got very fast hands. Murph's only about 6'6", 6'7". He's got good length. He's a strong kid, 240 pounds, and what I think separates him is the fact that his second and third bounce typically is as high as his first. He can keep balls alive, so he'll tip the ball to himself sometimes just to kind of keep it alive. When he injured his ankle, he had a very severe sprain right at the end of our non‑league, he missed the end of the middle game and then the next three, of which we lost all but SMU and we won that one close, simply because we miss his energy. And then when he came back, he was not‑‑ he hasn't been back to the bouncy Murph until here, probably from the last two, three weeks. He does get opposite. We preach that. Ball goes up, get guys opposite. Percentages say that's where shots come off most of the time. He's a tough kid, he pursues the ball and he does have a knack for finding ways to get to it. Q. It was all about confidence last year with Nick and his shot, and tonight it looked like he was shooting with confidence. Talk about how he's kind of built his confidence from. COACH KENNEDY: Well, he certainly evolved. For us, as I've told him ‑ and Terrance and I visited with you many times about this‑ reality is your role has changed. Chris and Zach are gone, you guys are our leading scorers, we have to have someone step up in those moments and take that big shot. Nick knocked down a big jump shot. We went to him on some baseline screening action. I thought he did a great job of reading them, putting himself in position and then knocking down shots. And he got on a little bit of a roll. We tried to milk that as long as we could. Q. You heard Murph say that they were fouling. What was your take on those fouls early? And then the way that they, I guess, affected their lineup first half and second half. COACH KENNEDY: Well. We wanted to just be aggressive. We wanted to be sure that we came into this tournament with an aggressive mindset and the way to do that is to attack them inside out. That's what we were trying to do early. They got in foul trouble. Gabriel did not play very much in the first half, and then we counted that‑‑ Terrance picked up a couple early fouls, and we were just trying to be aggressive at the rim. A lot of those were off second‑ and third‑chance points. So part of the 19 offensive rebounds also led directly to fouls. Now again we weren't terribly efficient from the free throw line in the first half. I thought in the second half we did a better job. Q. I know you're looking for more offense from Nick, but is it part of the game plan for him to score 22? He came in averaging I think around 10. COACH KENNEDY: Well, I like the game plan when he scores 22. I would like to replicate that tomorrow night. If Nick is willing, I'm certainly willing. Q. If you could look back at the Tennessee game when you played in Knoxville, what happened in that game and what do you have to do differently tomorrow night to have a different outcome? COACH KENNEDY: If you remember, I think we jumped off to a 14 or 15 to 2. We were really good early, aggressive off the bounce, attacking them, very similar to what we did tonight. Except actually, we were making shots. I think Terrance hit his first three or four shots, and we got off to a great start. We zoned them. They are a motion‑based team. We were trying to throw them out of rhythm and it was working. Coach Martin went to his bench, had a couple kids come in and make plays and they settled in. Next thing you know, they got out on us in transition. They hurt us on the glass. For us to have a chance to be successful, obviously the key number tonight was the fact that we out‑rebounded them by 14, 19 of which were on the offensive glass. I think that if memory serves, Tennessee was plus‑10, ‑11, ‑12, in that neighborhood. And our team can't overcome that. And as a result, a close game for about 30 minutes got away from us midway through the second half, and they spurted, started knocking down a couple shots, and then we weren't able to catch up. Q. What do you think has made Tennessee's man‑to‑man effective? I know a lot of teams play man‑to‑man, but does Cuonzo put a the little bit of a twist on it or do they have some personnel that help them out there? COACH KENNEDY: I think they play to their strength which is a tribute to Cuonzo. Trae Golden, he didn't make all league, did he? I voted him all league. I honestly think he's maybe the second or third best point guard in this league. I really believe that. I think he does a great job on the ball. I think they got length in McRae and Tatum on the wings. Both those guys are long, athletic kids. Obviously Jarnell is a man, Maymon is a man, physically‑‑ they play physical basketball. They don't allow you to dribble through them often. They do a good job of, I guess Bo Ryan coined the phrase, pack line, and that's kind of how they play, where they don't allow splits off the dribble. They're going to make you beat them over the top and you got to finish strong at the rim. So I think they're a physical team. I think they're a tenacious team. I think they're a team that plays to its strength on both ends. Q. Given how teams sometimes adversity as a rallying point or motivation and the timing of your game against Auburn, is that something that you had thought about going into this game or talked about to the staff? And what are your general reactions to that news? COACH KENNEDY: You mean in lieu of the allegations? No, we didn't. We didn't bring that up. I didn't think it had any bearing whatsoever on this game. For us, it was just about us coming out and taking a do‑or‑die attitude. And I thought for the most part, we did that in the second half, and once we settled in and got into a little bit of a rhythm, we were able to get the needed separation. I don't really have any thoughts on that. I don't know any. I heard a snippet of the allegation. I don't know where any of the information is coming from. And obviously it's something serious. When you throw that out there, that's not something that you hear about every day. CLAUDE FELTON: All right. Thank you very much. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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