Opening statement:
“I thought we played much smarter in the second half. We played a good basketball team tonight. There were some good things we did, and we knew exactly what they were going to do. We talked about transition defense. They go some easy baskets that way and we talked about offensive rebounds and they did that. We know that they can make shots. We were prepared, but there were some pretty good guys out there tonight. I thought we did some good things. It just shows me how much more work we need to do to get where we need to be. I thought that the kids played hard out on the floor, but I don’t think we always played smart. They’ll get better as things go on. We played probably a Final Four team tonight. We aren’t going to see too many teams better than the team we faced tonight.”
Positives from the game tonight:
“I thought we played hard. We competed. I don’t think we gave up. I thought they tried to do some things we asked them to do and I can’t ask for much more than that.”
On Carolina’s traps:
“We knew they were coming. We knew they were going to trap and we talked about that. But we tried to dribble thought the traps. We just didn’t rotate right during the traps. But we knew they were going to trap. We were prepared for it, but they were long, athletic, quick and they beat us to some of the spots.”
Other thoughts:
“I learned where we are, and we needed something to humble us a little bit. We won three games, two exhibition games and we won our first game of the season. It puts things in perspective for us; we need to go back to the drawing board. We need to work a little harder, stay a little more focused. We thought we had a chance to come in here and win the basketball game. That was what we were hoping for. We didn’t have a lot of things go in our direction and you can’t just come in and be down 10 already. We were playing hard, but I wanted to go to my bench and play people. I want to play eight, nine or 10 guys this year. If guys get tired, then we need to go to some of our younger guys whom we think can play for us.”