We realized Seton Hall was playing for a tourney bid, and they had a lot to gain from tonight. They were working hard and we didn't match their intensity for 40 minutes. |
We started to fade a bit, started to lose focus the last couple of weeks. We talked about tightening up, taking care of the little details and just sort of refocus and regroup. |
We wanted to start off fast. We wanted to stress the first five minutes of both halves. We've had some slow starts throughout the year. We didn't want that to happen again. We didn't want to give them reason to believe. |
We were kind of talking about it, joking around. It didn't seem like (the Big East tournament run) had much effect. It seemed like we could have lost in the first round and it wouldn't have changed much. |
We'd been preparing for that the last couple of days. We knew Aaron was going to make the right choices. |
We're definitely excited. We've done our best to stay up and motivated for these games. We want to prove to ourselves and show people what we can do. We're pretty confident about it. We get to go down to South Carolina, see what we can do, maybe surprise some people or show them what we're made of. |
We've done a good job of improving consistently all the way from the freshmen to the seniors. The coaches do not let us get caught up in winning. |
We've just got to take care of what we can control. We can't really do anything about the other games. We just need to make sure we win and see what happens from there. |
What hurt us last year was giving up penetration and then giving up open shots. That's what they do really well. We know that. It's something we're aware of. It's no secret. It's just a matter of us being able to execute it in the game. |
With the Big East, you can't afford to have too many losses. There's so many tough teams. When the Big East Tournament rolls around, you want to have the highest seed as possible. |
You can tell from the preseason rankings that they don't really mean much. I don't think we were in the top 50 when the season started. They're not really representative of the truth. It's something you really try not to worry about too much. It's nice to get the recognition, but there's always going to be critics and there's always going to be people who doubt you no matter what you do. |