Feb. 13, 2010

Recap |  Final Stats

Maryland Head Coach Gary Williams

Opening Statement:
"I thought that Duke did a good job of finishing off the second shots; those really hurt us when we were making little runs there. At the start of the game we didn't come out tough enough to run our offense, took some bad shots, which was a combination of Duke playing good defense and our not being able to run our offense. We weren't really in sync and you cannot do that here. You have to be really ready to play and everything has to go your way and things like that and we didn't play well enough. Basically that was the game. In the second half we were more competitive, I thought we played harder. We made a run there that was nice, but it just wasn't there. If you look at the course of 40 minutes we didn't do the things necessary to win the game either offensively or defensively, especially giving them the second shots that they had."

On giving up so many second chance shots:
"Well they're bigger than we are. We've been able to rebound against the Florida States and Wake Forests, which are also big front lines, but we just couldn't do it today. I thought it was just in keeping with the way we moved, trying to run the offense, trying to play good man-to-man defense, I thought that we didn't move very well in any of those areas and that carried right over to the rebounding."

On his team getting frustrated in the second half:
"There's no frustration allowed. What's frustrating about playing a college game on national television against the eighth ranked team in the country? If you're frustrated, grow up, that's life. They're going to be frustrated by guys yelling at them when they get a job. Frustration comes from, if you're really playing well then you get a few bad calls, that's frustration. Frustration isn't not running your offense well or screening out, that's not playing well."

On Brian Zoubek's contribution:
"No I haven't seen Zoubek [play as well as he did]. He should be getting a lot of credit with what he's done with himself as a basketball player from where he was as a freshman to where he is now. He is a guy that really found a way to enjoy his college basketball career, which is a great thing. It's nice to see that happen to people and he's doing a great job."

On Greivis Vasquez's second half:
"He just played where I thought he could be playing in the first half. That's his level of play. We need to find a way to start games. We've been doing a great job starting games up until today. This is one game, that's three losses in the league and we have to play Monday night so no one is dwelling on this very long."

On the difficulty of playing three games in five days and how tired the team may be:
"You don't worry about that, you worry about the next game. That's the only way that you can do it. If you look at Duke's three perimeter players, they're averaging like 39 minutes a game. They can do that, and we can play this next week and give it a shot."

On Vasquez taking over the game for a period in the second half and the inability to do so the rest of the game:
"It's hard against a good defense to do that for 40 minutes, Duke knows what they're doing, they do things to stop him first. If you look at our team, I'd assume that they would come into the game to try and stop him. When you have a good player and the other team is really focused on that player, you must do things in your offense well: screen, passes, spacing. We didn't do much of that in the first half, and I think that showed in our not shooting any free throws in the first half. We just weren't aggressive enough to get to the free throw line."

On Coach Mike Krzyzewski's 1,000th game:
"I guess Mike got most of them here, he got them in two places, Army and here. I got mine in four places. Mike's at the point that he is Duke basketball. He's created a thing that very few schools have and I guess that this is his 30th year and when you think of Duke basketball, you think of Mike Krzyzewski. The way his players play, the effort they give every game; I've seen Duke a few times not play well, but I've always seen the effort there. That would characterize the way Mike's teams play, whatever players they have, and they have good players, they're usually out there playing hard, working hard and playing for each other. I think that to be able to do that for 30 years is an accomplishment, given the fact that it wasn't that way when he got here. He had to turn that around and he did a great job in doing that and then sustained it, which just might be just as tough."