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NCAA MEN'S 2ND & 3RD ROUNDS: ORLANDOMarch 19, 2014Mark GottfriedRalston TurnerJordan VandenbergT.J. WarrenORLANDO, FLORIDA THE MODERATOR: If you could just talk about the quick turnaround and the challenges that presents and how you prepare for that. T.J. WARREN: It was a very quick turnaround for us. We came in from Dayton this morning, about to have a light little shootaround, so we'll be prepared and be ready to play. JORDAN VANDENBERG: It was kind of weird getting somewhere at 4:30 in the morning and having to prepare to come in today. But we got a pretty good night of sleep. We got to sleep in a little late, and we should be ready to play tomorrow. RALSTON TURNER: It's been a very quick turnaround. We got here very early this morning and tried to sleep in, so it kind of feels like today is already gone almost. But we're preparing for tomorrow, so we should be ready. Q. TJ, have you had any time to even think about SaintLouis yet at this point? T.J. WARREN: Yeah, we had a get together this morning, going over their sets and the way they execute. We understand that they start five seniors, so pretty veteran team, and they should be ready to play. We're just going to come out with a lot of energy and aggressiveness and be ready to compete, so it should be a great one. Q. No.12 seeds have had a lot of success versus No.5s in the tournament. Do you like being No.12 and what does that entail as far as the match‑up goes? RALSTON TURNER: I don't think we really pay attention to the seeding. I just think that we're just happy to be here and excited for the opportunity to play. Whether or not what history said or not, you still have to play the game tomorrow. History won't win the game for us. JORDAN VANDENBERG: I agree with what Ralston has to say about that issue. T.J. WARREN: You've got to be ready to play. Seeding really doesn't matter, just got to be ready to play regardless of the situation. Q. TJ, in last night's game you passed the legendary David Thompson for most points in a season for an NC State player. When you found that out what were your initial thoughts? T.J. WARREN: It was a great honor. It's been a long season. It's just another accomplishment, but really not focused on that. We're in this tournament, and that's the main priority for us, to win as many games as possible. It's just a great opportunity to be in this situation right now. Q. You think back to the beginning of the season, the game at Cincinnati and then North Carolina Central, this team has come such a long way since the beginning of the year. I'd like all of your perspectives on does it seem like a different team now? Talk a little bit about the process of improving so much. JORDAN VANDENBERG: Yeah, it's a little different from those games seeing as though I wasn't playing in those games. But yeah, we've grown as a team. We have a bunch of young players that learned to play together. We're not even close to the same team we were last year. We had to grow during the season to get our chemistry working correctly, and as we showed throughout the ACC season we went from a team that couldn't really close games to a team that proved we could play with some of the best teams in the nation. T.J. WARREN: Going through the season, like Jordan said, he wasn't with us early in the season with the loss to Cincinnati and Central. It was an adjustment. As the season went along, everybody was willing to get better and everybody was adjusting to each other well. Chemistry is flowing right now, and I feel like we're playing our best basketball right now in this month of March, so it's great for us. RALSTON TURNER: I think one of the things we did early on is we had so many new faces. We had a lot of turnover from last year, and sometimes it takes a while to kind of come together. But I think as the season has gone on, we've grown, and we've really come together as a team. Q. Jordan, you guys have played back‑to‑back games in conference tournaments, but when you factor in the travel between here and Dayton, is this even a tougher situation than a conference tournament situation? JORDAN VANDENBERG: I wouldn't necessarily say that. It seems like we get a day off in between and we get a day to recover and we get through some rehab and everybody, whereas in the conference tournament it was daytoday to day, and any anything lingering injuries you had, you didn't really have time to get treatment or recover from. I've already had like three, four sessions of treatment and I should have a couple more before tomorrow morning so I think this is actually a little bit easier than a conference tournament to have a turnaround of at least a day in between. Q. When it comes to SaintLouis, I've heard them compared somewhat to Virginia in the ACC because of their solid half‑court defense. Just your thoughts on that; do you see some comparisons? RALSTON TURNER: Yeah, you know, like Jordan mentioned earlier, they're a veteran team, so they know how to play. They have a physical style of basketball, and we're just going to be ready to match that. We're still going to have to be able to execute our offense through the physicality, and on the other end we're going to have to do a good job of defending them. T.J. WARREN: Yeah, like Ralston said, they're a veteran team. We've just got to be able to match their competitiveness and come out aggressive with them and try to get out on transition to shake up their half‑court defense. That starts with our defense on the other end. Just continue with that. JORDAN VANDENBERG: I mean, there's some close comparisons between them because they're both really good at playing defense. Saint Louis is like a top five defense in the nation, but we've got a lot of offensive weapons at our disposal: TJ, Ralston, they combined for 42 points last game, so I think we can have a good showing against Saint Louis. They're a veteran team as everyone keeps saying, but I think we have the chemistry to go out there and have a good showing. Q. TJ, last night you might not have started off the game as well as you would have liked to but obviously finished strong. How important is it for you when the rest of the guys recognize what you're going through and step up? T.J. WARREN: It's great. Ralston had a phenomenal game. He hit some big shots. Tyler did a great job facilitating, getting everybody involved. Jordan had a lot of great, athletic plays in the post. It's great when everybody is contributing and playing well. MARK GOTTFRIED: First of all, we're excited to be here, and we got in late last night. I think by the time we got to the hotel it seemed it was about 4:00, 4:30 in the morning. But our guys are going to get a little rest today and then they're going to be very excited about playing tomorrow night. Got a great challenge. We're playing against a really good team that probably is one of the oldest teams in the country. I don't know that I've seen very many teams that start five seniors anymore in college basketball. That's going to be an interesting challenge for our young, inexperienced team so it should be an interesting day. Q. Coach, you've talked a lot about the spirit and the resilience of this team. In some ways has this been one of your more rewarding seasons as a coach just to see that growth? MARK GOTTFRIED: Well, I hope it continues. But I do; I feel good about what's happened because of where we started. I go back and think about how much we lost from last year. I think about our early practices. I think about some of our early games in November and the uncertainty of how we were going to play and how we were going to score and how we were going to defend and all that kind of stuff. I really like our team. That's one thing about it. I like‑‑ and you used the word that I've used a lot ‑‑ I like our spirit every day. Even after the tough games we had and losses we had that were really emotionally tough, our guys seemed to always bounce back and have a good spirit about themselves. That's made it a lot of fun. Hopefully we can keep on going with this for a while. Q. You addressed the quick turnaround. Could you talk about how that may affect your substitution patterns, and also an update on Cat Barber's status? I understand he was really sick last night? MARK GOTTFRIED: Well, first of all, we played a lot of games recently, starting with the ACC Tournament and then heading to Dayton, getting here to Orlando, and it may mean at times we give our guys a little bit, find spots to rest them, especially T.J. I thought even last night there was a stretch in the second half where I needed to get him out and just let him have a breather. I don't take him out often, but he needed a few because it is a quick‑‑ we've played a lot of games in a short amount of time, plus the travel like last night, which I think was the best way to come was to come right after the game because our guys weren't going to go to sleep anyway right away. As far as Cat goes, he seems to be a lot better today. He was really sick yesterday. I didn't know he would play at all, to be honest. He gave us some good minutes in the first half and then at halftime he really didn't have anything left in the tank, so he's got a little more bounce today. So he's going to get some rest tonight, and we'll see hopefully tomorrow. I think he'll be okay. Q. 12 seeds have had a lot of success versus 5 seeds in the tournament. Why do you think that's so? What makes that match‑up so intriguing, and do you like coming in here as a 12? MARK GOTTFRIED: You know, I don't really know that there's one answer to that. I was an assistant coach at UCLA as the 5 seed and Tulsa beat us as a 12 back in, I think it was '94. I think sometimes that 12 seed is a team sometimes that may be surging towards the end. Maybe they're on the rise and maybe sometimes the 5 isn't. I don't know that that's always true. But it does seem like that match‑up, that 5 and 12 provides some upsets. You know, in our case, truthfully I don't think we're really interested too much in 5s or 12s or whatever it might be. I mean, our guys seem to be playing well. They have a lot of confidence whomever they're playing. I'll tell you what I've done the last‑‑ well, since last night. I got on the plane last night probably about 1:00 and started watching Saint Louis closer, and they're really good. I know they've lost a couple here early, but I like what I see. They're a good team. We'll see. I don't know that there's one magical thing about that 12 and 5 match‑up. Q. You seem to have pulled the right levers this season, some of the different moves, putting Ralston back in after T.J.'s injury and then when you switched to Tyler as the starter, is that just a feeling‑out process, and was there some luck in that, or is that something that you feel like it's worked out for you well this season? MARK GOTTFRIED: Well, I think all of us in coaching, what you're trying to constantly do is to make your team better. After every game, win or lose, you're studying your team and trying to figure out, okay, how do we need to score better, who needs to play more, how do we use our rotations, how should we defend better. And my theory has always sometimes been, have a hunch, you bet a bunch. Sometimes you just have a hunch. With a couple of those moves you mentioned or some other things we've done, you're not always right. Sometimes you make moves and you get two or three or four games down the line and you say, boy, that just didn't turn out like I thought it was going to. And then sometimes they work in your favor, and the nice thing about our team this year with the nine guys that play, sometimes it's just game by game a little bit on who may play more, whether it's a defense match‑up or a lot of different things. Anyway, the nice thing is our guys, regardless of kind of which decisions I've made, they've just kind of hung in there and adapted pretty well to whatever the decisions we've made have been. Q. How tough is it with this limited time to put a game plan in place for this when the guys were‑‑ were they asleep until about noon today or when did they finally get going? MARK GOTTFRIED: It's hard. Two days before the game‑‑ a game, especially a game of this magnitude, you never want to be taking off at 2:00 in the morning, which we did last night, but at the same time that's part of the turf. That's okay. It's not going to be an excuse for us. It's not something that we are going to build in that puts us at some sort of disadvantage. We're excited to be in the tournament, and we're going to go play. But it does make it hard, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. I told our guys, we could be back at Reynolds Coliseum playing in the NIT, so we're not going to scribble about travel or how hard it may be or quick turnaround. We've got to get ourselves ready to play, and that's the bottom line. We'll be ready. Our guys will get some rest today. We let them sleep today. We probably got into the hotel, it was around 4:00‑ish, I think, by the time they went to bed it was 4:30, but we let them sleep until 12:00, 12:30 and got 'em up, go 'em something to eat, move them around a little bit today. It's part of the process, and we'll be okay with it. Q. Earlier you talked about the experience level for Saint Louis. The seniors on the Saint Louis teams are Rick Majerus' guys. Any thoughts going into this game about Coach Majerus? MARK GOTTFRIED: I got to know him pretty well from a lot of different times we've crossed paths. As far as basketball goes, he was one of the brightest basketball guys‑‑ he always wanted to talk basketball. He would want to talk pick‑and‑roll out of nowhere. You could be standing there doing something and we'd end up talking like that. Obviously when he passed, that kind of touched all of us in coaching because one way or another everybody had crossed paths with him at some point in time. I know that was really hard. It was really hard for their team I'm sure, and for Jim and everybody involved, and then obviously Jim has just done a magnificent job kind of bridging that gap and moving forward. But yeah, that was something. Q. Can you talk a little bit about T.J.'s emergence and what he's meant this year? MARK GOTTFRIED: Well, I think T.J., what I like the best is his improvement from a year ago. He had a really good freshman year, but didn't make very many threes, shot about 54 percent from the foul line, had some really nice games as a freshman, and then he'd kind of hide in some and he wasn't as consistent. And then I think throughout this year, really this summer and then throughout this year, we've all watched him become more consistent. He's improved every part of his game, even the defensive side of things he's gotten much better. He's improved with his maturity, which has been, I think, really a big part of his game developing, as well, his demeanor, all those type things. He's had a phenomenal year, as good as anybody, and sometimes we forget he's still a sophomore. He's not an upperclassman, really. We're proud of him, and hopefully he can keep doing what he's been doing. Q. You talked about watching video of Saint Louis on the plane. Looking at their team offensively, is there a player that you feel, hey, we really need to contain this guy or make him do things that he doesn't like to do, and if so, who will get that assignment? MARK GOTTFRIED: It's interesting, when I watch them, and I know that Jett is kind of their motor, it seems to me, and he turns the corner there on some ball screens, and he's like Bo Jackson running at you with speed and strength, and he's a big, strong guy. But I also think all those guys, you've got to try to contain all of them and what they do. I know they've lost a couple here recently, but the one thing that's been impressive is they don't really get out of their game much. Teams have had a hard time disrupting them. That's part of having five seniors out there. Whether it's taking a three away from a couple guys or their ability to drive it by a couple guys, I think it's kind of all five of them, especially those starters. They're a tough group. Like I said before, I've been involved in college athletics a long time, and when I coached at UCLA back in the late 80s I was an assistant coach in the early 90s, everybody had seniors back then. Well, nobody does, and here you've got a team that has five starters, which is really rare in college athletics. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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