Obviously I'm a little biased but I think he's the best player in the conference. He's been so important because he brings such intensity and work ethic, and he automatically draws a double. |
Overall, I thought this was probably our best stretch of man-to-man defense that we've played all season. Now, we just have to keep working at that. We've been playing better. The last four games, I think we probably are playing our best basketball. It's coming together. |
That was one of things we talked about. We wanted him to lead the nation in rebounds. He?s done a real good job with that and what?s he?s really done is played with a lot of intensity in our practices and games. He?s the hardest worker. |
That was our low point of the season. We had eight games remaining. I challenged them personally and as a team to make a commitment to play defense, to make a commitment to win all eight. |
That's what we were talking about as coaches after the game, the fact that we didn't fold when Kenny went down. It's great to have guards. |
The guys have really responded. Defensively, they've taken it more personal, played a lot harder and a lot more together. |
To win the championship, that could be the team we have to beat [in the league's tournament]. |
We didn't get to their shooters early. They made shots. |
We didn't have an answer for Hassan for the entire game. |
We didn't show a great deal of patience. I thought one of the reasons we had been so successful in the month of February is our patience on offense. |
We lost to [conference champion] Albany [65-63] after we had an open shot at the buzzer to win it. Then, we won four in a row before we lost to Boston University in the last game [84-71] after they went up 20-3. We caught BU at a time when two of their guys made all their shots. |
We started well, but we had some personal issues. We had to discipline a couple guys. A potential starter, Bo Taylor, was released from the team. Bernard Lowndes got hurt. |
We took an enormous number of threes, more than we ordinarily want to take. The shots were there. We had a lot of open threes, but they just didn't go down tonight. |
We're capable of winning this thing. That's why we're here. |
With the three guards, we started moving the ball. We started making the extra pass, rather than just throwing the ball to Kenny and watching him play. |