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NCAA MEN'S 2ND & 3RD ROUNDS: AUBURN HILLSMarch 20, 2013Randy BennettMatt DellavedovaJordan GiustiStephen HoltBrad WaldowMitchell YoungAUBURN HILLS, MICHIGAN MODERATOR:  Opening statement from Coach Bennett. COACH BENNETT: I don't have much. Just we're excited to be here and join the rest of the field. Look forward to competing tomorrow. MODERATOR: We'll now hear from our student-athletes. Q. This is for Matthew. I know it would take wins from both teams, but what's it like knowing that Broekhoff is here? Have you talked to him much since the Olympic trials? MATTHEW DELLAVEDOVA: Just that every now and then, he's having a great season. I know it will be cool to hopefully catch up with him. He had a nice buzzer beater that we all saw the other week. So, yeah, happy he's having a great year. Q. For any and all, how tired are you? How tough was the trip? MATTHEW DELLAVEDOVA: No, we had a good trip up here. We're feeling pretty good. We got our asphalts in, so I think we'll be pretty fresh ready to go tomorrow. Q. Coach Pastner made a statement earlier from Memphis that you were a college player -- you were an NBA player who plays college basketball. Any comment to that? MATTHEW DELLAVEDOVA: No I mean, I don't know about that, but, yeah, it's a nice compliment. Q. Jordan, not only was your first start last night, it was also your first NCAA tournament game. What was weighing on your mind more? JORDAN GIUSTI: Well, I don't really know. I didn't really -- I've been playing with these guys all year. I'm comfortable on the court. Starting was just -- I don't know. It's new, but it wasn't really that big of a change because I've started second halfs. I'm used to playing. As far as the tournament goes, I mean, it's just another game really for me. I'm not really used to the whole tournament thing, but right now it's just another game. Q. Obviously with the playing game, the travel and all that, are there advantages to having that game and now coming into this game? MATTHEW DELLAVEDOVA: Yeah, I think, I mean, you get the raw start. Hopefully we can get a good start tomorrow. I think that happened at our conference tournament in San Diego, played a game earlier than us. They got the jump on us. So hopefully we can do that tomorrow. JORDAN GIUSTI: Yeah, I think it should definitely help us. We're already kind of used to the tournament right now. We got the jitters out, you know. So I think it should help. STEPHEN HOLT: Definitely our win against Middle Tennessee was a confidence booster. We're just going to use that to our advantage as best we can. Main thing is just being excited to compete and being ready to play tomorrow. BRAD WALDOW: Yeah, I feel like getting that win yesterday, it's, like Stephen said, a great confidence booster and it will keep us rolling to tomorrow. MITCHELL YOUNG: Yeah I think the boys are feeling confident after our win in Memphis. Maybe we'll experience some jitters and some nerves. Hopefully we can use that to our advantage. Q. What do you guys know about Memphis? MATTHEW DELLAVEDOVA: Obviously athletic team, like to get up and down the floor, play pretty physical. Seen a bit of them so far, but definitely be watching them a bit more tonight, a bit more game film. STEPHEN HOLT: Just like any game, we have to take care of the ball, make key stops definitely, and basically box out and rebound. We know it's just going to be a physical game, just like Middle Tennessee, you know, in the tough games in a tournament like this, that's what it comes down to, is consistency, getting stops and just playing hard and aggressive and making plays. Q. Matthew, someone said that you're like the Tom Brady of guards, that you take a lot of look at film. Have you had a chance to study Geron Johnson who might be your matchup? Have you had that opportunity to really look at the Memphis films yet? MATTHEW DELLAVEDOVA: Yeah, I've been having a bit of look at their game so far. Be watching it a bit more tonight. Q. Do you look at a lot of film? MATTHEW DELLAVEDOVA: Yeah. I try to watch as much game film as I can. Just, yeah, pick up little things what we need to do or what could work against other teams. MODERATOR: Thanks guys. Coach Bennett will be able to answer all questions now. Q. You're known for bringing a lot of Australian players in. Did you know about Ryan Broekhoff when he was at AIS? COACH BENNETT: Yeah, we knew about Ryan. We liked -- we had taken Clint Steindl the year before. They're kind of the same position. So we couldn't really take Ryan because of that, because they want their guys to go in and play right away, Clint was same position. I would have liked him a lot, great kid. We can't take them all. Q. What concerns you most about this Memphis Tigers basketball team? COACH BENNETT: Their transition, their ability to turn you over, I think those two things. A little bit like Middle Tennessee, but they're bigger, bigger version. A little bigger, a little deeper. Yeah, they have really good guards. And I think that the thing that's hardest to scout on them is they can just steal the ball. Their pressure definitely. They get steals and that's hard to guard. It starts with that. You have to take care of the ball against their pressure, so to speak. Q. Is it an advantage or disadvantage for you all having to play last night and now turn around playing again two days later? COACH BENNETT: It's whatever you make it. We're going to try and make it an advantage. I do like this about it: We hadn't played in a week, and it would have been ten days since we played in our conference tournament, because we played a week ago Monday. Playing Tuesday shortened that up a little bit and I thought we'd have good practices during the week. I thought we played well last night. I think it helped from that standpoint. Q. I know that Page got hurt in the Gonzaga game. I know he didn't play last night. What is his status and is it true that Giusti was a walk-on? COACH BENNETT: Jorden Page, he won't play tomorrow. We're not sure exactly what the extent of his knee injury is. I doubt he will play this week. If we were fortunate to advance, then maybe. I don't know. I can't say that he would. Giusti is a walk-on. He'll be on a scholarship next year, but he was a recruiter walk-on. He was a guy that we liked him as a player and we thought in time that he could work himself into being a guy that goes on scholarship, which he has. He's tremendous in an area, he's a really good defender, and he's a really good competitor. As he learns to score and get more comfortable, it is not easy just getting thrown in there and you're supposed to be able to make plays, but you know you're going to defer to the other four guys, and that's tricky. You want to keep the defense honest, but you don't want to shoot too much because you know that's not your role. So he's done a great job of managing that role, and that's hard to do. I mean, sometimes we have some better scorers on our team, but they can't play that role with the rest of our players as well as Giusti can. And then Giusti, it's hard for me to take him off the court because of how good a defender he is. Q. Is it easier to have a guy like that on and lose your starting point guard when really Dellavedova has the ball so much? COACH BENNETT: I don't know if it's ever easy, but Matt takes care of so many things for us, and I'm going to find out how many things next year when we don't have him anymore, but he's -- yeah, he calms everything down. Put it in his hands and he's going to get everybody where they're supposed to be and keep from turning it over while he's doing it. So it sound easy. It's hard to find a guy who can do that. It's hard to speed Matt up. It's hard to get him out of sorts. He's very composed and he's seen about everything. He's seen big athletes against him. He's seen the quick ones. He's seen the trap. He's seen the show. He's seen the switch. He's seen them all. His experience and his leadership and his basketball IQ are about as high as you're going to get in college basketball. Q. On Sunday after the selection, you were talking about how your offense might get better and Matthew suggested one reason would be that teams that hadn't seen you as often as San Diego and Gonzaga had. Is it simply because Middle Tennessee hadn't seen it or was it something else? COACH BENNETT: It's more than that. You want to simplify it, I'd say it's because we made some shots. Like Matt hit shots and Holt hit shots and sometimes it just gets down to that. You have to make some open threes, and we had some in those other games; didn't make them, and Matt in particular. But last night we did, and so your offense looks better when you're hitting shots. The other factor is it matters, and that's -- they really haven't seen us. In particular, they haven't seen Matt. Yeah, I'm not sure film does him justice all the time. You don't realize how big he is, how strong he is, and what's going on in his head when he's playing. Q. Randy, what does it do for you to have such a consistent power team like Gonzaga, facing them two, three times a year? COACH BENNETT: Well, we -- what it's done for us, it's elevated our teams to the point where we won the league two out of the last three years. We didn't win it this year and Gonzaga had one of the best teams they've ever had, probably their best. So iron sharpens iron, and it's made us do things better, sharper, whether it be recruiting, executing, rebounding, leadership, whatever it may be, every area of our program, because we're trying to win the league. This year we didn't, but we lost to a pretty dang good team. So that's where it helps. It also helps like in a game against Memphis. People say have you seen anything like this? Well Gonzaga's pretty talented. They're a pretty good team. So it's not like we haven't seen a team this good; we have. I notice that when we play Creighton, because Creighton's perceived as a really good team. And I think most people would have thought that they would be better than we are, but they weren't, and they weren't on that day. And they're a really good team. Doug's a great player and Greg McDermott does a great job. They have a very, very good program and a very good team, but when we played them, it didn't seem like that was a team that was better than anything that we'd played in our league. So I think that's where it helps, is we play against good talent, good personnel, a good team. BYU does the same thing for us. MODERATOR: Thank you Coach. Good luck tomorrow. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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