Sunday 01/18/2015
Overall thoughts:
“Really good performance by our team. We’ve really played well seven out of the last eight halves. Even though we only won one game on the road in that stretch, you go back as a coach and evaluate your team’s performance. We played very well against Louisville, very well in both halves against Pittsburgh and the first half against Virginia I thought we played well. That was my message at halftime. We’ve played six out of seven well, now we’ve got to make seven out of eight. We knew Syracuse was going to make a run at us, we knew it would be a little ugly at times, but I don’t think it got under ten. We kept them at bay.”
On Rod Hall’s shot-making:
“We made eight threes today, we made eight threes at Pittsburgh. We won both of those games in the league. That’s a big part of our team. We struggle to score sometimes. When you make shots like you did today, it energizes your team, it energizes your crowd, it gives everyone a little hop in their step.”
On Rod Hall’s defense on Trevor Cooney:
“It’s effort and discipline. Cooney is uncanny in his ability to search out the ball. Guys penetrate, he’s always moving to try and get a shot. It takes incredible discipline to not react to penetration. He creates his own offense as well as anyone that you’ll see.”
On defensive team effort:
“Well we took out a good player. I thought Landry (Nnoko) and Sidy (Djitte) really fought inside against (Rakeem) Christmas. They weren’t allowed to just throw the ball to Christmas and that was going to be their offense. We made it hard for him to get the ball.”
Opening statement:
“I thought Clemson played great today. I thought their defense was tremendous. I thought they got some good looks and knocked down some shots in the first half… Give Clemson a tremendous amount of credit. They played very well at both ends of the court and made some shots, which is always helpful in this game.”
Clemson’s defense on Trevor Cooney:
“They just stayed with him. They played him the same that St. Johns and a couple of other teams have. They kept a guy with him and didn’t leave him and did a good job with him. He got a couple of good looks early and that was about it.”
On any thought of coming out of the zone defense:
“Yeah, (I thought about it) in 1987. We play one defense and everyone knows that. So if you know that, why would you ask that?”
On Syracuse’s defense:
“In the first half we allowed them to take shots and they made them. In the second half we moved up and did a little bit better job. But the offensive rebounding was the game; when we stopped them in the first half a couple of times in a row we did play good defense, they got four putbacks. They had 20 second-chance points I believe. We haven’t really had that happen to us this year, this was the first game where we got hurt on the boards. This is a good rebounding team, and they did a great job on the boards against us.”
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