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NCAA MEN'S REGIONALS SEMIFINALS & FINALS: LOS ANGELESMarch 27, 2013Tyreek DurenRamon GallowayTyrone GarlandJohn GianniniLOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA THE MODERATOR: Coach Giannini, if you can make an opening statement, and then we'll take questions. COACH GIANNINI: Well, obviously, we're thrilled to be here. We're playing another outstanding team. It's the goal of every team and player and coach to get to the NCAA Tournament and advance. It's an absolutely wonderful experience and thrill for our players, our alums, the school. The interesting challenge is to, at this point, maintain our focus. It was interesting coming out of Selection Sunday, we had a couple of days before Boise State where we were able to be very focused. Of course, you win and you travel an hour after the game. You have less than 48 hours for your next game and less than 48 hours for the next. So everything's been very immediate and very focused. Having a little bit of extra time I think makes maintaining your focus a little more difficult. So I'm pleased with what we did today. I think we got back to business which is what we have to do against an opponent like Wichita State. Q. Tyreek Duren obviously had a much better game against Ole Miss. How does that change things for you and improve the team's offensive flow? COACH GIANNINI: That's a great question. He is key for us. He and Ramon are key for us. We had a number of very good players and that's why we've been able to advance. When Tyreek is playing well, our chances of winning skyrocket, quite frankly. He gets people involved. He scores. He's a complete point guard. He's a difference maker. So, yeah, his outstanding play against Mississippi was critical. Q. Welcome to Los Angeles. What were your original feelings when you guys first were put into the west, and what are your feelings now coming here? You're going to be playing a game at probably 11 p.m. body time. Also, for your fans, I mean, that's an 11 o'clock tip on the east coast for your fans. COACH GIANNINI: That's a good question, but it never crossed our minds. We really wanted to get in the tournament. They could have sent us to any region. Our guys are really excited. In fact, all kids, I mentioned, have the goal of playing in the NCAA Tournament. But beyond that, they've loved the NBA. There is no NBA arena that's had more great players or more big games than the Staples Center. So, actually, from a players' perspective, they're probably thrilled to be out here with good weather and palm trees and playing in the Staples Center. Q. What about the TV issue as far as your fans at home? COACH GIANNINI: They'll stay up. Q. Can you talk about the talk around the tournament is that this is the not sexy region, maybe not the best region? I know you've heard it. I just wanted to know what your thoughts are about that and how you would sell this region to people and why stay up if you're on the east coast? COACH GIANNINI: Are you referring to the coaches or the teams? Q. Both, coaches, model wife, how would you sell this region, your team? COACH GIANNINI: If you're looking to see the household names, Kansas or UCLA or Kentucky, you'd have to look elsewhere. But frankly, it's not a concern to us at all. I think the beautiful thing about the NCAA Tournament is to see great teams that you don't see every night and to see different players that you might see some day at the next level. If I'm a basketball fan, I'm really excited to see Wichita State play La Salle. To see guys that I don't get to see play, it seems like, every week on ESPN during the season. Obviously, we're both really good teams. I think the reason that the NCAA Tournament is so popular is that it's not predictable and you do get to see people that you don't always get to see. I think this is what it's all about. Q. The four guards that you use so much, did that kind of evolve out of necessity or plan? Can you kind of just describe, it seems that you give those guys a lot of freedom to make plays. Just kind of describe your style of play with them? COACH GIANNINI: Well, we've gone three phases in that. First, last year, it was simply the lineup that we had the best success with. This year, Steve Zack had developed so much that we played two bigs an awful lot early on, in fact, started that way for most of the season. Then with Steve getting hurt, we went back to it out of necessity, finally. We like to mix up three guards, four guards. But with Steve's injury, it became necessary to play four guards, but it's not a problem. Our guards are tremendous. I think it makes it hard for the other team. I think Jerrell Wright playing more minutes is something I would not want to see if I was an opposing coach. And any of these teams with four guards would be not brilliant if you were going to slow them down and make them less aggressive. Our guys are hard to guard. They're very quick. They get in the lane. They're good decision makers. They find each other. If I'm a coach, I'd rather play against a team that has a bunch of plays versus a team that has a bunch of players. And right now we're a team that has a bunch of players, and they're hard to guard when they play together. Q. This is a uniquely Philadelphia Story, because four of your best players are from the city. Does that make it more special that it's homegrown talent? COACH GIANNINI: I think it does, and it's by design. When I hired a staff that was a hundred percent Philadelphia coaches, a lot of people said, shouldn't you have someone from outside of Philadelphia? And my response was that every great big five team that I remember had great Philadelphia players. So we had to start there. We wouldn't be here without Philadelphia players. Secondly, because I coached at the University of Maine most recently, it really taught me to recruit all over the place, international players, southern players, midwest players, now you see us with some southern players and some midwest players. So I knew that was part of my background. But I think any of the Philadelphia schools need really good Philadelphia players. I'm glad for guys, whether it's Jamere Nelson or Kyle Lowery or Dionte Christmas or Tyreek Duren that kids could have their families see them play all the time and they could be with coaches they trust and that they could on NCAA Tournament level teams. So I think it's a great thing for kids to stay at home. It's a recruiting pitch, but it's a real pitch. It's a wonderful thing for kids. Q. Just in relation to that a little bit, is there a common denominator characteristic to these kids in Philly that you're looking for, whether it's a toughness or whatever? What do you see out there? COACH GIANNINI: We're interested in two things right now. We're interested in guards and big guys. That's why we have such good role definition. We want to keep our standards for the guards we recruit extremely high. We have great guards. As a group, I think they're as good as any group in the country. Maybe someone has a better individual here or there. But I wouldn't trade these five, six guys for any group of five, six guards. So we want to keep those standards very high. For big guys, we want toughness. There's a trend now with big guys who want to shoot the ball and be the next Kevin Durant or the next Magic Johnson. But we know that those come not one in thousands, not one in millions, but one in billions are like that. We want our big guys to be tough, and we want them to be physical, we want them to be rebounders. We want them to be gritty and like to be around the basket. So, of course, right now we have great chemistry. We want guys who like each other. If someone comes in on a visit and we are worried about them fitting in with other people or with the coaches, we'll probably back off. We're pretty spoiled as coaches right now. Q. Is there any sense that your story has been overshadowed by Florida Gulf Coast? Most other years you would be the story of the tournament so far. You are one, but there is kind of this other team? COACH GIANNINI: We play in a conference where we play top 50, top 100 teams every night. This isn't an upset thing. We've beaten teams like this during the season. Getting in it as an at large is tough. We got in as an at large. We didn't beat a low major school in a conference tournament to get here, and now we had to prove we belong. We've played high level competition all year. I don't think you could possibly call a school out of the Atlantic 10 that gets to this level a surprise. Maybe people are surprised we've won three in a row. But we've beaten good teams all year. You have to in the Atlantic 10. This is not a low major success story who all of a sudden gets on a big stage, and wow. They could beat someone as good as Butler or they could beat someone as good as VCU or they could beat someone as good as Villanova. We've played those games and won those games all year. Q. It's kind of a follow‑up to the last question. The celebrity and attention and spotlight that's been shown on Florida Gulf Coast, would you have liked that for your team, given how far they've come? COACH GIANNINI: This attention is great, but this is not what motivates us. We're not going to play harder or be happier if there are five pictures of me instead of three (laughing). It just doesn't matter. It really, really truly doesn't.  It doesn't. I don't think that we‑‑ we're a school that's won a National Championship. This is our 12th NCAA Tournament. It's not our second year of eligibility. This is a school that has the third most national players of the year. We play in one of the top six conferences in the country. So we're not rags to riches. Q. Wichita State's rebounding and size, what kind of problems does that present for La Salle? And I guess, Steve Zack may play, could you update us on his status? COACH GIANNINI: First, their rebounding is a problem for anyone, because they're one of the top rebounding teams in country, and it's an especially big issue for us. I mean, we're smaller where we play four guards a lot. I think the rebounding could be the biggest issue in the game. It's a strength for them and a weakness for us. I mentioned earlier, we can become a very big team very quickly by playing Steve Zack and Jerrell Wright together. You pretty much trade a 6'11" guy for a 6'2" guy and it dramatically changes things, and we started big for well over half of the year. I'm a conservative coach, and I always am prepared for not good news, so I didn't expect to have Steve. With about 20 minutes left in practice, our trainer said, hey, the doctor cleared him. I was surprised, to say the least. So he's able to play. Now he did some more things today. He's obviously out of shape from not having played in four weeks. One of the reasons he's cleared is they've clearly rested the foot and allowed it to heal without putting stress and pressure on it. So he may wake up tomorrow and be sore, but I don't know. But there is nothing structurally wrong. He can play if he feels well enough and we put him in there. So that dramatically changes things. Q. You've said a couple of times that you wouldn't trade these guards for any group of guards, and you also said that you're a very good team. When did you know that your team had the capacity to be this good and comprised this way? COACH GIANNINI: When we didn't have Ramon and we lost a heartbreaker to Villanova two years ago in our second, third, fourth game. Yeah, we didn't have Ramon, and we led Villanova for 39 minutes and we lost in a heartbreaker. I said, we're pretty good, yeah. Yeah, that was when I‑‑ and of course, it's been well‑documented, we finished 15 and 18 the year before. We had bad chemistry. That's when I had the questions. I didn't have questions in the middle of last year, at the end of last year, the beginning of this year. But I had questions going into last year. I saw how well we played against Villanova, and how devastated we were by losing a game in the last few seconds at Villanova. At the time, I think Villanova was 48‑1 at home or some ridiculous number like that. So to go up against that level team, and that tough environment where your odds of winning, any team of winning is about 2% mathematically based on their track record in that building. I mean, we had them beat. We were devastated, but our staff said, you know what, this is‑‑ we're pretty good, and that's when I started to feel good about what we had. Q. What is it like when you have a moment like this, you're in the Sweet Sixteen, and there are rumors going around that you might be tied to different jobs and different schools might be looking at you? How do you handle that and keep your team focused? COACH GIANNINI: It's like anything else we've talked about. It's what matters and it's what's real. No one has called me. No one is talking to me. It's nice to get questions like that, but you're the only one who seems to think I'm a real candidate for anyone. If a school's not talking to you, it doesn't matter. Plus, during the season, you have so much invested in these kids. You have so much invested in your program. I think coaches who have been at a school as long as I have now, you care about a lot of the people there and you appreciate the school and what they've done for you and your family. La Salle has done great things for me and my family, and we're in the Sweet Sixteen. So what you just mentioned would be the furthest thing from my mind. But it's also not a real thing. There is a lot of speculation and the internet feeds the whole coaching carousel thing. But there is nothing real going on. THE MODERATOR: Questions for the student‑athletes? Q. Tyreek, after the first two games, not so great for you, the last one pretty solid. Feeling a little bit better going into the game on Thursday? TYREEK DUREN: Yeah, I'm just excited about the game, period, for me and my team to even be in the Sweet Sixteen. I know I didn't play as well the first two games. I just know there are some things I wasn't doing, I wasn't really being aggressive, and wasn't really looking to push the ball in transition. I tried to do that in the third game, and I had good results and we ended up getting the W. But like I was telling everybody else, as long as my team won the first two games, I don't care if I played bad. As long as we were able to win, I was fine with that. Q. I asked this of your coach also, but do you guys feel like you've been overshadowed by Florida Gulf Coast, their story? Or do you feel, as he does, that you guys should be considered as a‑‑ I mean, you're number 13, but you're not that rags to riches kind of story. RAMON GALLOWAY: What they're doing is exactly what we're doing. I'm happy for them because, like you said, I guess they were a number 15 seed and people probably didn't expect them to win. We were the number 13 seed and people don't expect us to win. So like Tyreek said, I'm just happy and my team's happy to be here. We're not really getting too caught up in the Florida Gulf Coast and La Salle. We're just trying to play and keep advancing. Q. Just to follow up on that, Tyrone, John said that you guys aren't really sort of a Cinderella story because you've been playing in a tough league, you played in the Big 5, you played in the A‑10. You've been beating good teams all year. He said basically other people don't know about you guys, but you guys know what you can do. Do you feel like that, that you've been doing this all season? TYRONE GARLAND: Yeah, coming into the tournament, me and my teammates knew the teams coming into the tournament. We got smacked by Saint Louis. We lost to Butler. Like Coach said, those games got us ready for us to be playing against the other big teams in this tournament. So when we were getting wins it didn't really shock me, because A‑10 was a great conference this year. For the Florida Gulf Coast thing, we're really not trying to shine on ESPN every day. We're just trying to be low key like we've been doing and sneaking these wins by. Q. I'm sorry, it's a third Florida Gulf Coast question. But for all three of you guys, would you guys like to get the acclaim and credit for what you have done the way that Florida Gulf Coast has, or is under the radar the right place to be? RAMON GALLOWAY: I mean, absolutely. We want to get praised for what we're doing, but we also don't want to get caught up into that. It's not really our job to say we should be on TV or we should be doing this. We just want to keep playing, and keep winning, and keep getting these wins. We can't really focus on being on TV all the time. If we do what we have to do, we'll get our credit where it's due. TYREEK DUREN: I agree with Ramon. Like he said, if we keep winning, we'll end up getting the national spotlight, but as far as that goes, I think we have enough shine in the city of Philadelphia.  I've been getting phone calls like everybody is telling me the whole city is behind you. Everybody's looking forward to your wins. That's enough for me. I don't care about the national spotlight. Like he said, as long as we keep winning, they're not going to have any choice but to put us in the spotlight. TYRONE GARLAND: I like being under the radar. Q. How would you sell this match‑up? This is an 11 o'clock start on the east coast, and not a lot of people are saying this is one of the games to watch like Florida Gulf Coast. How would you sell your team? What is exciting about you guys? What do you think is exciting about this match‑up? Why should people watch this game? TYRONE GARLAND: We're basically two of the same teams. We're both going to go out there and play hard. We're both teams that people didn't think we were going to get here, so it would be a great match‑up. Plus it's in the Staples Center, and it's just great. RAMON GALLOWAY: How can you not watch Ramon Galloway, Tyreek Duren and Tyrone Garland and Coach G? I mean, I don't understand why people don't really want to not watch us. We're in Division I basketball and we're in the Sweet Sixteen. So point blank, period, we're playing Wichita State, which is a great team.  They've gotten great wins to get here. We got great wins to get here. If you look at our track record, that should speak for itself. It shouldn't need an actual blow‑up, and oh, such a great game. But we're in the Sweet Sixteen. You've got to watch everything. Q. Ramon, what's it like putting up some shots out in practice on the court where a certain guy from Philly has made a number of game winning jumpers over the years? RAMON GALLOWAY: I mean, it feels awesome. We played in the Barclay Center, and it was great. I don't know the true feeling of playing on the court yet, because we haven't played game. But it's just great to be out here on the Lakers' and the Clippers' court just having fun and enjoying it and seeing something different. I've been on the west coast for AAU, but I've never been to LA and I've never been at this stage. So I'm just soaking it all in, enjoying it and staying humble. Q. You guys are all Philly kids. You're playing in a Philly school. You've got La Salle in the Sweet Sixteen. Does it make it a little more special that you're from the city and the school that you're playing in? Also, how well did you guys know each other in high school? TYRONE GARLAND: I mean, Tyreek won 10,000 championships, so (laughing) everybody knew who Tyreek was. I heard about Ramon. He was at Florida. I just heard about this kid Ramon. He just flies out of the gym. When he first came home, I actually played against him, but I think they beat us though. RAMON GALLOWAY: I always knew of Tyreek, because like at this Ramon said, a thousand championships. And like Ty said, because I had left Philly and kind of like Philly had great guards and stuff, but when Tyrone was setting records, he's in the record book behind Wilt Chamberlain which is awesome. I can't say that. When I was coming back, we played in a playground game against each other, and I was just knowing then when I played against him and knowing he was on my team, it was just an instant connection because these guys are great. Their family took me in, and I can't say nothing more about them. They're great guys and great teammates. TYREEK DUREN: Yeah, I knew Tyrone. When I first committed he was supposed to decide with me, but he left me out to dry and finally came back home. Then I always heard about Ramon, like Tyrone said. Everybody told me he could jump out the building, and I definitely wanted to get him at La Salle. Now I'm sitting on the podium with both of them. RAMON GALLOWAY: Thank you. Q. The Florida Gulf Coast guys answered this question, so I was going to ask you. Could each of you tell me what you know about the city of Wichita or the state in which they play and have you ever been there? RAMON GALLOWAY: No, I don't know. TYREEK DUREN: No, I've never been to Wichita. RAMON GALLOWAY: I don't even know where it's at. TYRONE GARLAND: I saw a store down here called Which Wich. Q. Do you know which state it's in? TYRONE GARLAND: No. I just know I played against them when I was at Virginia Tech and they beat us. RAMON GALLOWAY: What state is it in? TYRONE GARLAND: Kansas. TYREEK DUREN: Steve Zack said we passed the Wichita exit when we were going to the airport though. I do remember that now. Q. The Wichita exit? TYREEK DUREN: Something like that. He pointed it out and said, that's who we play. Q. When you were in Kansas City? TYREEK DUREN: Yeah. Q. Ramon and Tyreek, could you talk about your style of offense and the problems it presents for defenses with the guard, heavy on the guard play? TYREEK DUREN: I think with us, the fact that we play four guards, like a lot of teams think they have an advantage over us because they might be bigger than us. But I think at the end of the day, it's more of an advantage for us because we can clear it out and force them to guard us. A lot of times you're playing bigger, slower people than you. So it makes it hard for them to guard us. As long as we rebound against any team, we have a good shot at beating them. RAMON GALLOWAY: I think Tyreek touched on a lot of the things that basically our offense presents. But I can add is that we play freely and we get each other open shots, and we look to create plays for each other. On the defensive end we've got to man up and will ourselves to find a way, because we're playing against bigger and more physical teams. Q. Since you guys left for Dayton, you haven't been back to Philadelphia. It's been Dayton, Kansas City, and now here. Do you think that staying in basketball mode has helped you guys out as opposed to going back home and having a break? TYREEK DUREN: Yeah, I think it's helped us out a lot, especially so we can remain focused on the task at hand and keep winning these games. If we would have gone home, we might have lost focus just enough to slip up a little bit. So I think G. had the same thing in mind when he decided to not let us go back home, So I think it helped us a lot. Q. For those of us on the west coast, how do you describe a kid who comes from Philadelphia and plays basketball? I'm not talking about what the Philly guards are like or Philly centers. But just, in general, can you describe what a Philadelphia basketball player is like? TYRONE GARLAND: A Philly basketball player? Q. Is there a general characteristic? TYRONE GARLAND: Yeah, be tough, be all tough, and we're fearless. Anywhere we go, we have that Philly swag with us, and we're just ready to play against anybody. RAMON GALLOWAY: He said a lot. Playing in the playgrounds all our lives we're taught to be tough and not back down from anybody. So like Ty said, hard‑nosed, tough, don't back down, and go at whoever is in front of you. Q. You obviously played well this year and shot well from beyond the three‑point line. Is that something that's always been a part of your game or have you developed more as an overall player the last couple of years? RAMON GALLOWAY: Jumping, absolutely not. I didn't start jumping until I moved to Florida. I guess there is something in the Florida water. When I came back home, everybody just thought I jumped out of the gym. But shooting, I always was able to shoot, because like I said, growing up on the playground, I was smaller than everybody. I couldn't go in there and lay the ball up, I had to use a southwest floater. So I couldn't really go in there. I've always been kind of a shooter and always could dribble the ball. But coming to La Salle and going through what I was going through, coming out of SouthCarolina, it just helped me overall. Like you said, trying to help out on rebounds, help out on defense, and my teammates push me to do everything. They don't just push me and say, Ramon, go score. They tell me like help us win, do it all. So I'm just glad that I'm blessed that I got this opportunity, and I'm blessed that I'm a well‑rounded player. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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