We just have to stay with it. It's a little like a year ago when you kept looking at our 3-point field goal percentage defense and saying, 'My goodness, they're really bad at that.' We stayed with it and chipped away and made improvements. When we did, we became a better team. |
We knew we had no choice but to come together or it's going to get worse. When you lose four out of five games and you go through what we went through, the best way to get an identity back is to make things hard. I thought our team really responded. |
We need to find out how we can become the team we were for so long. Looking at it from this perspective, it's not like we're going in at 6 a.m. and playing football or doing anything crazy. |
We played our very best at the end. |
We ran a play; the play was defended. |
We set out this year and had three goals; to win a conference championship, to win 20 or more games and to get to the NCAA Tournament. We got all three. I am here to tell you that the road getting here was really, really difficult. |
We were at the low end of the ACC, and our big guy got hurt. We ended up winning nine of the last 11 and were within four minutes of winning the ACC championship. On offense, we became a very unique team to play against, and we had a lot of different guys make shots. Sometimes when you play without a big man, it's tough on the other team. They have to adjust to you. |
We were going to trap him. We were going to play multiple people on him. That's the one thing about our team. We have four big bodies that can rotate inside. They all did a very good job. |
We were one rebound away (from winning) about four times. They seemed to get those. |
We'll have an opportunity to be a terrific team a year from now. |
We're going to have to do that (rebounding) more collectively. We were like that anyway, but we had a little bit more room for error. |
We're going to try our best to provide as much help to the guy guarding him on that area of the floor. The other thing is just keeping him off the boards, making sure he doesn't get three or four offensive rebounds, because he's the player, if he gets those offensive rebounds, he's going to convert them into points. |
We're good enough to take you to that eight-minute mark where you say it's anybody's game. We haven't been good enough to finish the deal. |
We're in a tough stretch. We're going to know a lot more here in the next couple weeks. |
We're not nearly the team we were rebounding the ball as we were with Thornton. As we come into this game with Charlotte, we're a little like them in that we love to make 3s. ... Before we could win games if we had bad shooting nights, but at this point we can't. |