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BIG TEN CONFERENCE MEN'S TOURNAMENTMarch 15, 2013Tracy AbramsJohn GroceBrandon PaulCHICAGO, ILLINOIS Indiana – 80 THE MODERATOR: We'll go ahead with an opening statement from coach. JOHN GROCE: I think it was a tale of two halves. I thought our defense was really, really good in the first half. In fact, if it wasn't good, I don't know if I have ‑‑ I told these guys after the game‑‑ you're playing a team that's been ranked number one in the country more than any other team in college basketball and you shoot 27 percent and 16 percent from three and turn the ball over eight times, and you're down 14. Had they not showed the resiliency and toughness that they did in the first half, we would have been down a lot more. I thought our defense was really good. Second half it flipped. I thought our offense was really good and defensively we weren't able to stop them in the second half. I thought they got too many layup's, they got baskets in transition. Obviously, we opened up the floor as a staff because we felt like we needed to increase the number of possessions there. So we started pressing, which opened up the floor for their athleticism. They got a dunk or two. But offense good second half, defense good first half. When you're playing Indiana, you got to be good in both, on both offense and defense, both halves. So I give them a lot of credit. They made a lot of plays. I'm really proud of our guys' toughness and resiliency, their ability to keep playing and not tie their defensive effort to shot making in the first half, I think probably made me the most proud. Questions for the players? Q. For both players, you had played in a really tough conference all year and made some comebacks, but how prepared do you feel from these experiences just going into the NCAA tournament now? BRANDON PAUL: How prepared do we feel coming into the tournament? I really don't know how to answer that. We play in the toughest conference in the nation. If we play anywhere else I feel like we have a chance with anybody in the nation. Obviously we have won some tough games. We came back. But right now we're just excited for Sunday to see ‑‑ we had a goal going into the season, so we're excited for Sunday to see what happens. TRACY ABRAMS: I agree with Brandon. We definitely play in the toughest conference in the country, so we'll just wait to see what happens Sunday. Q. Brandon, defensively what were they doing that was bothering you and D.J. to combine for 4‑23? BRANDON PAUL: They get into you. Obviously Oladipo is a great defender. They play hard. They're scrappy. That's something I got to get better at. We missed some shots, but at the same time I was trying to get to the free throw line. And I think I did that well tonight. But some shots just got to fall. They fell yesterday, they didn't fall tonight. That's just something that happens. Q. Tracy, you guys have had sort of a pattern of you kind of ease into the offense. Again today it was sort of a battle a little bit early and then in the second half it really got going. What's the difference when you guys are clicking on offense? TRACY ABRAMS: I would say if anything our guys just playing together and trusting each other and trusting the system. Execution, we definitely got to put two halves together. Just execution and executing the game plan and trusting the coaches and the players. Q. Can you go into a little more detail, Tracy, on what started working for you in the second half? TRACY ABRAMS: Just being aggressive and just playing under control. I talked to Coach Ford and he just said, just slow down a little bit and just play under control. And I definitely took that advice and I would say things started going my way then. Q. Brandon, what do you take away from these couple days here at the tournament? I know you guys wanted to be playing on Sunday. Obviously disappointing. But just sort of the overall feeling when you come up short. BRANDON PAUL: The takeaway is if you compete at a high level, you can compete with anybody in the country. I felt we came in with the mindset that we can win all these games. We went through some rough stretches throughout the game and I felt like once we put two halves together we'll be in a good position. Sometimes one half our defense might be off or the next half our offense might be off. Once we put two halves together we're going to be a force to recon with. And I think we still, we're going to continue to look forward to Sunday, because I feel like we have a lot of basketball left. THE MODERATOR: All right. You guys can return to the locker room. Questions for coach. Q. John, I would like to expand on that very question that you were just asked. It seemed like for a time maybe 10, 15 minutes that the team just couldn't get going and then all of a sudden everything clicked. What's the difference? JOHN GROCE: I think in the first half a couple things. They were really locked on our shooters. I mean heavy. And I didn't think that ‑‑ I thought that was, that took some time for us to get adjusted to, even though we encouraged them to do that, calling some things and trying to take advantage of that. I thought it was good on their part. I thought they defended well. Then I think the second part to that is we missed five lay‑ups in what we call the own the box area around the rim in the first half. You might miss one, maybe two. But you want to beat Indiana, you got to go 3‑5, 4‑5. I mean they were crips. They were right there. You can't draw up a play to get a better shot than those four or five lay‑ups. We got to convert them. We convert those, maybe instead of being down 14 we're down seven. So I thought that was the biggest reason why our offense wasn't very good in the first half. I thought in the second half we got into a little bit of a rhythm. I thought Tracy settled down. I thought Brandon was pretty consistent with what he was doing offensively. Griffey made some plays. We got some things on some ATO's out of timeouts and we executed pretty well and got some in transition. But at the end of the day we just weren't able to stop them enough. It's 60‑52, we have the ball with 7:50 to go. We're right there. In fact, that's better shape than we were in, in the game at home. But we just weren't able to stop them enough down the stretch. Our offense was good enough in the second half, our defense wasn't. Q. You mentioned Tracy's improved play in the second half. In the first half is he trying to do too much or is it mentality? JOHN GROCE: Sometimes I think he is. Trying to find that balance. I thought that we wanted him to be aggressive, but we wanted him to be aggressively patient in trying to find that balance. That's not the easiest thing in the world when you're wired like he is, to be very aggressive, which I like. I would rather a guy be that way and try to reel him back in than trying to drop kick him in the rear end all the time. But I thought he settled down and played at a much better pace in the second half. Q. On your offense a lot of times we focus on where the guys are making the shots on the perimeter. But as you go forward how do you feel about what you're getting inside? JOHN GROCE: I would like to get more. People ask me, I've had a chance to be involved with offensive play calling in my previous stints and when I was at Ohio State we ran a lot of plays for Greg Odom. We ran a lot of place for Terrence Dials. I think some of the guys we have have got to develop down there. And they can get a little bit better, but at the end of the day some guys have knacks for scoring. Like Zeller can score down there. You get him the ball down there he's going to score. Dials could do that. David West could do that when I was at Xavier. He would come to the bench and say, "Coach, just recycle the first three plays." It's an unbelievable luxury to have when you have that type of paint attack and you have guys that demand double teams or demand the attention of the perimeter defenders. It really opens up some things. I do think Nnanna's gotten a little bit better down there. Griff and Hen are kind of Griff and Hen. So we got to kind of develop some of what we have already down there. And then, to be honest with you, we have got to add some things with our program moving forward through recruiting. Q. You had mentioned that you were even in better shape this time around than you were when you pulled off the upset. Does that frustrate the team a lot when they kind of fail where they had succeeded before? JOHN GROCE: I don't think so. These guys are hard to frustrate. I think the staff does a pretty good job of staying positive. We played pretty good. I told the guys when we were talking, we won seven of our last 11 games. Losses being at Michigan, at Iowa, and at Ohio State. And we were 51‑51 at home. And today tot Indiana, who is really good. We have got six, Top‑25 RPI wins. The only two programs are Duke with seven and Indiana with eight. We played pretty good basketball. We're capable of playing really good basketball. But I like Brandon and Tracy's mindset. I could hear them talking to the team in there after the game and they said, hey, we need to play two halves. That's great. It's one thing for me to say it, but when peers are saying it to one another, that means even more. These guys care a lot about one another and they care about Illinois and about our team, about doing well, about playing well. This time of year that's really important. But the thing I appreciated the most about them is their resiliency. I thought we were really resilient today. Because the offense was not very good in the first half and as I mentioned at the outset here, it could have been really ugly had we not defended like we did. That's a sign of being mature, that we didn't tie our defensive effort to how things were going for us on offense in the first half. Q. You played Oladipo twice now and he's a guy that's had a breakout year. What do you see in him as potential with his ceiling and where do you think he's at right now? JOHN GROCE: Obviously he had 12 and 11, double double. But I don't think the stat sheet tells the story with him. It tells only part of it. I think defensively he is terrific. He, as Brandon said, he gets up into you, he takes things away, he reads things well. You can tell he's really intelligent defensively. He's as good a defender on the perimeter as we played against all year. Now you add his things he brings to the table from an offensive scoring perspective and his rebounding and that makes him even more potent. Q. Joseph Bertrand has struggled lately. Talk about his game today. JOHN GROCE: He did some good things. He did some really good things. Had five field goals. Thought he was active. Thought he played really hard and competed. Which Joe does that most of the time anyway. I thought he was good. I thought he had two really solid games here in the tournament and hopefully that Will continue to give him confidence moving forward, heading into next week. He looked great today. Those guys did a great job. Those trainers did a great job. We probably could have tried to play him last Sunday, I just don't know if that would have been in Joe's best interest and our team's best interest moving forward. So it is what it is. But he looked good today. He looked good. Q. When Indiana was in here people were talking about all the contributions from other guys. And then when you, even here, we're not hearing a whole lot about Cody Zeller, but how good was he today? JOHN GROCE: He was a load. He's a terrific player. There's a reason he's on all those magazines to start the preseason. First team All‑American candidate. Probably a National Player of the Year candidate. He's a terrific player. He's very versatile. One of the things he does really well exceptionally well for a guy his size is run. He can really run. Really run. I thought he was good. But I thought their other guys were good too. I thought Abell gave them positive contributions, made a couple jumpers, which typically doesn't do that. Those are big plays. Sheehey makes two, 3's. He's, whatever he is, 32 percent 3‑point shooter. Those are two big shots. Watford made a couple and he's been really good all year from three. He buried a couple. The last one was a real dagger that he made. So he contributed. I thought Ferrell was really good. Great defensively. Oladipo gets a lot of credit for his defense on the ball. I think Ferrell's really good defensively on the ball. And he really pushed the pace and the tempo and got them some of those lay‑ups and easy baskets when we couldn't quite get our defense set. Especially in the second half. THE MODERATOR: Thank you very much. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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