Dec. 9, 2009

Recap |  Final Stats

Head coach John Groce

Opening Statement:

“Obviously my hat is off to Austin Peay. They were able to create energy and enthusiasm tonight that we weren’t able to create. I thought they were the tougher basketball team from start to finish. We certainly made some plays here and there that were good plays, but not enough of them. Their togetherness and their toughness…Wes Channels was the best player in the gym tonight. His ability to rally his team; his ability to huddle his team…you could just see it and feel it. That’s the third time they’ve come back from double-digits now. They were down 14 at the half against Niagara and came back to win. They were down 16 to Akron with seven minutes to go and won. Tonight they were down 13 with 1:05 before halftime. That’s hard to do this early in the season and I think Channels is a big part of that for them.”

On three-point shooting:

“You can’t count on making shots every night. I just didn’t like the pace of our offense. I thought we picked and chose when we ran in transition and I thought the pace of our half-court offense was too segmented. The ball didn’t flow; we didn’t have enough player movement and ball movement. We weren’t popping; we weren’t sprinting into our screens and sprinting on our cuts. We’ve got to get that corrected for our offense to be more efficient.”

On Armon Bassett getting adjusted:

“It’s a two way street. It’s an adjustment for our players as well…not just for him. He knows that. It’s not just about him. It’s about our team. We’ve got to find a way to utilize his strengths and our other guys’ strengths as well in order to play the best basketball that we can play.”

On the message to the team after four wins followed by three losses:

“Well we’ve got to get better. It’s a long season. We’ve got 32 games guaranteed to us, and obviously everybody hopes that they play more than they’re guaranteed. We’ve played seven, so we’re not even at 25 percent of our games played at this point. We do have a young team, but at some point we’ve got to mature.”

DeVaughn Washington

On the ups and downs of a season:

“Sometimes it can get a little bit inconsistent, but we just have to make sure that we come out and play hard. We need to be humble every time we come out and execute our game plan. We didn’t do that tonight. Austin Peay came out and pounced on us hard in the second half and I don’t think we responded to that very well. I think we’ve just got to come out with a little bit more humility as a team.”

On how the team is taking good care of the ball:

“I think we actually do, but sometimes we can get a bit rushed. That’s something we obviously work on everyday and the turnovers just happen sometimes. In some situations, there is nothing you can do about it.”