Dec. 7, 2010
Head Coach Gary Williams
Opening statement:
"We're trying to bounce back from a tough game to come back from. The Temple game, it's a tough game to come back from for two reasons: we could have played better; I think the players feel, I feel. Yet we still could have won the game just with a couple things going differently. There are the tough ones where if you play the best you can and do everything right, according to what you're trying to do and you still get beat because the other team was better, that's one thing. But you don't want to do things that cause you to lose close games. We can do better than what we did.
"That's something, where we are with this team this year, if you have to go through that and then we get better from it, OK, we'll go from there. It's not something we're going to hang our heads about. We'll come out ready to play tomorrow against [UNC] Greensboro and see where that takes us. That's where we are after the Temple game. We had a very good practice yesterday. We'll go at it pretty good today and then see where we are at 7:30 tomorrow."
On how he has addressed the team following the loss to Temple:
"We always encourage guys to come in after games, wins or losses. Sometimes it's easier to get them to come in after wins. They come in and it's a good situation because nobody yells at anybody and it's not on the practice floor. It's just, `here's the tape, we thought we should have done this,' or those types of things. `You made a good play here.' Video is really good. That's an important part of coaching now, to be able to show players video. Not a long period of video, but just clips on basic stuff they did. You can really get it down to an individual-type thing for eight minutes so a player can really see a lot of the things they did during a game, both positive and negative."
On judging players over a period of time rather than just one game:
"Well that's the thing, everybody overreacts I think if somebody has a good game or somebody has a bad game. That's not the way I operate. You look at not just the Temple game; you look from the start of the season to here. I guess that's nine games. You look at the three best teams we've played - Pittsburgh, Illinois and Temple, and put Penn State in there as a fourth team, and you base a lot of things on that. Then you base practices - yesterday's practice, today's practice - to get ready to play Greensboro. This isn't about experimenting; this is about putting the best team out there to try and beat Greensboro."
On how Terrell Stoglin has progressed:
"Terrell had a really good game against Temple. He wasn't without mistakes. I think people a lot of times - and it's a good thing - they see the great drive or the 3-point shot, but the pass that was flipped right to the Temple player goes unnoticed. Coaches have a way of seeing those things. So he's really made great progress.
"Basketball is a hard sport for anybody to come in, and you see cases of it all across the country no matter how much publicity a guy gets. You're a freshman in college; forget the basketball for a second, that's hard to be a freshman in college for anybody. Then you throw in basketball, which is a two-semester sport, so you don't have time to be here, you don't redshirt unless there's an injury or something like that. You have to dive into it right away. We're playing in Madison Square Garden two weeks into Terrell's career. That's hard to do, and he's done a good job. I think he's really one of those guys when it comes time to play he's ready to go. He enjoys the competition of the games."
