Quotes from Gary Williams
1/8/2011 7:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Jan. 8, 2011
Head Coach Gary Williams
On the team's preparedness for Duke:
"They've had enough experience. They've played in Madison Square Garden. They've been on the road at Penn State, which isn't obviously like Duke but it is a road game where they had a pretty good student crowd there. We'll see how those experiences lead to tomorrow. But it's not just about tomorrow; it's about our 15 remaining league games that I'm concerned with. This is one game; I think people sometimes forget that. Win or lose, this isn't going to determine exactly where we finish in the league. We all understand that as a team and that's the first thing you understand going in there to play. This isn't the seventh game of the world series."
On Duke:
"They're really interesting how they've adjusted to losing a player as good as [Kyrie] Irving. They haven't really missed a beat. Players who were playing very well have even stepped up from there which is hard to do, but they've done it. They have a lot of different things they can do. Obviously they start one of the bigger teams in the country but then they can quickly get [Kyle] Singler to the four and bring in another shooter, which is really two different styles of play. Of course [Nolan] Smith, really interesting approach to the point guard position where he is a scorer playing point guard. It's worked very well obviously for them. So they can do a lot of things, and when you see any list of the best seniors in the country, Singler and Smith are always two of the top five in the country. No other team has that. That's a unique thing experience-wise, especially winning the national championship last year. That gives them the most experience of any two players at that level in the country. So they're very good."
On the importance of rebounding:
"Well [Duke is] so big that that's a big part of their game. When you help on Smith or Singler, whoever you help off of they just send that guy to the glass and it's been effective against some good teams. We have to team rebound this year anyway. Jordan [Williams] is a great rebounder, and we need numbers from our guards just as much as from Dino Gregory or James Padgett, somebody like that. We have to rebound well from the guard positions."
On communicating:
"To play good defense you have to talk. It doesn't matter whether you play zone, man-to-man, press, you know you have to talk. We weren't very good at that early in the year and we've gotten better at it. Obviously down there it's harder. It's like playing in a domed stadium in football. It's really loud, louder than outdoors, but that's a smaller place down there and that contributes to it being louder. You have to be able to deal with it, so you just stay on it every day in practice and you hope gradually it gets to be a second nature and you're able to do that. All good teams communicate really well on the court without the coaches. In other words the coaches have to be able to communicate too, but the players on the court are the key to have to be able to communicate. That's where leadership comes into play and all those things come into play. A lot of times when you have freshmen they've never been asked to do that before."
On Cliff Tucker:
"I think both he and Adrian [Bowie] have played well in their different roles, but that's not to say Cliff won't start tomorrow or he wouldn't start Wednesday or whatever. In other words we're trying to find out what the best team to put out there to start the game to get us started the best is. Now it's really a luxury having Cliff come off the bench because he can score. A lot of times your subs aren't big scorers but Cliff can put the ball in the basket for us."
