Quotes from Gary Williams
1/21/2011 7:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Jan. 21, 2011
Head Coach Gary Williams
Opening statement:
"It's a different situation [playing so soon after a game], but like I said I don't mind because I want to get back on the court and play. I think that's the key. If you're a competitor as a player you want to do the same thing. You can't dwell on [the Virginia Tech game], you have to get ready for Clemson, and they're a good team. They've proven they're a good team by the way they've played. It's a very veteran team with four guys back playing significant roles from last year. They're playing a very up-tempo style that requires you to play good defense. They're a very quick team, similar to Virginia Tech in terms of their quickness. [We'll] do what we can do today to prepare and then, I've always felt this though regardless of the situation, playing and how you play determines the outcomes of most games. Not scouting reports and all those things. You have to, especially this time of year, you have to be able to go play."
On Maryland's defensive struggles against Virginia Tech:
"You never look at one game as how you play. You can make every shot one game and you say `wow, we're a really good offensive team.' We'll see how we do Saturday because it's a similar team in terms of the quickness of their guards and things like that. If it's a pattern we'll find out f Saturday. I think you have bad games; you can have a bad game shooting-wise, you can have a bad game defensively, so we'll see. You know there's a lot of ways to win games. In other words the way you execute your offense, the way you rebound. Last night we shot well from the free-throw line, which didn't get us the win but that was a positive thing that happened last night. You see where that leads to going into the next game. I thought the one interesting thing last night is both teams took the same number of shots; both teams took 56 shots. I thought that was interesting."
On what he saw when watching the game tape:
"We were open inside. It's hard to tell that from [court level]. But we were open inside. We did a lousy job of getting the ball inside and it wasn't one guard or anything like that. As a team we did a lousy job. So I take that to mean I did a lousy job in preparing them to go inside, because it wasn't a surprise that Virginia Tech played zone. We weren't in shock that they played zone because they had played it quite a bit. We worked hard for a couple days on our zone offense and you never know, some of that may be what we went against in practice wasn't good enough to give us the look we needed to get so we could run good zone offense. It's always a team thing. It's never `well the first team, maybe the second team should've played better.' You never know. But we were open inside, you could see that. We didn't move well in the offense and our patience wasn't very good. By patience I mean plays would break down long before we needed to do something else. In other words we could have made three, four more passes with a couple options we didn't get to. Hopefully we'll do it Saturday."
On James Padgett's play against Virginia Tech:
"He was great. I think that's the best game he's played. He didn't play the last game and I told him after that that was probably my fault and he was going to get his opportunity. He was ready. He took advantage of it and you'll see him out there tomorrow."
On preparing for Clemson in such a short time period:
"You have to find out first why you didn't play better. Once you see that, then you can get on to Clemson. But there's no sense in knowing everything that Clemson does if you're not going to play well. You have to correct what happened so I worked hard on that first and I have a pretty good look at Clemson by now going into practice."
