Dec. 21, 2010

Head Coach Gary Williams

On Dino Gregory and Adrian Bowie stepping into their senior role:
"I think Dino first of all has done a great job for us. He's been a defensive stopper on the inside and with Jordan [Williams] and Dino it's giving us a good rebounding tandem. Those guys have gotten a lot of rebounds together. Dino has picked up his scoring this year. He's a better offensive player this year in terms of seeing shots, being able to get open for shots, you can see the improvement.

"Adrian's been in and out in terms of really being on it, but he's had a good, since finals have been over, Sunday, Monday and hopefully today have been good for Adrian.

"When you become a senior, and not just those two guys but Cliff [Tucker] or whoever, you have a limited shelf life here, there's no doubt about it. You can see the end, it's here. I remember when I was a senior, I couldn't believe it. It was like, `what am I going to do?' I've played basketball all my life and I wasn't good enough to play after college so here we are. I think the sense of urgency you feel as a senior; you'd like to put that in to all our players. But if the seniors are good guys, and they really love the game then they feel that. Hopefully we can use that. We have to ride those three guys in terms of their energy and effort as we go along here."

On what needs to improve:
"We're not rebounding well enough. Jordan [Williams] and Dino [Gregory] are fine and I think James Padgett gives us enough size, we're OK. But we have to get rebounds from our guards, our wings. They have to be there because we'll be playing some teams that are really good rebounding teams. You can box out one guy, in other words if they put two guys boxing out Jordan when a shot goes up, then somebody else has to get the rebound for a while until we expose what they're doing. So we need team rebounding. That's very important."

On whether playing close to great teams helps build confidence:
"I think the good thing about a game like Pittsburgh early is you see it. It's not me saying it, the players see it that they can play with them. But at the same time there's this thing where players start accepting that that's good enough if you just stay with teams. So my job is to never let them accept that. In other words I can never be pleased, even though in the back of my mind I say `well that was good, we can play with Pittsburgh.'"

On how the Duke game on Jan. 9 effects how they go about the next three weeks:
"It's not Duke it's that week, Duke, Wake [Forest] and Villanova. It's the whole thing. When you start that week there's no let up until the end of the regular season. You have to be ready every night. So what we've tried to do is make sure we understand practice is going to be as valuable as games in terms of getting better. We know what we have to work on and we have to do that every day, we just can't do it tomorrow night. We have to do that every day of practice. That's what we're trying to do, do it every day of practice. It's worked for me, it's worked for the players. But that's the only way - it's like you said, we proved that we can play with good teams but we haven't proven yet that we can beat those teams."