Feb. 1, 2011

Head Coach Gary Williams

Opening statement:
"I'm pleased with our effort against Georgia Tech, the last game. Hopefully we can have that same effort going in to tomorrow night's game with Duke. Duke obviously is a good team. What happened against St. John's can happen sometimes when you jump out of conference. You know you hit it wrong, just the timing and everything about the game doesn't go well. Those things can happen. But I'm sure they're focused getting ready to come in to here."

On Duke coming in after a loss:
"I think when you're a good team, [a] good program you don't need any outside motivation. You're ready for every game. You do the best you can in that particular game. So I know myself personally I've never been big on using anything else but what we were as a team to get ready to play and I'm sure Duke is doing the same thing."

On playing Duke at home vs. on the road:
"I think the experience at Cameron [Indoor Stadium] is, for a new guy, that's completely different than most places you play, but other than that we're playing a team for the second time. That happens, well with expansion I was going to say it happens against every team, but it doesn't now. It's not anything out of the ordinary. You take what you can learn from the first game, put it into this game and hopefully the results can be better. We played well down there in terms of competing and now we have to do a few things better than we did down there."

On Sean Mosley and Dino Gregory saying Maryland has to eliminate the minor mistakes to win:
"A mistake is a mistake, minor, major, it doesn't matter. What they're really good at, and what I think Sean [Mosley] and Dino [Gregory] both meant, are converting your mistakes. In other words some teams you turn the ball over against and you get back on defense, play good defense, and get the ball back so it didn't really matter. It seems like Duke scores. If you make a mistake they score quickly and that's how they get on their runs. They score a lot of points in a very short period of time. Obviously you want to prevent that but the other part of that is you can't go into a game worried about making a mistake. Basketball's about trying to limit your mistakes but there's no perfect team out there that plays completely perfect. So hopefully we can force Duke into mistakes also."

On fan behavior vs. Duke:
"You want the college students to enjoy themselves. It's become a very big game for them every year. So you don't want to take away the enjoyment but obviously there's things that can't happen. Nobody's in favor of any damages or anything like that so hopefully our students have heard enough about in the last year and they'll do a good job. We do have great students here at the University of Maryland. There's been problems at other places that don't seem to get the attention that ours got last year. Somehow that became a national story and I think wherever you are and wherever you live its part of that deal. We're in the nation's capital and that's part of being here. That's one of the disadvantages."

On defense turning into offense:
"Well we try to use our defense to generate some offense, deflections, steals, things like that. When you're not doing well offensively sometimes all you need is like one easy score because your defense just seems to pick you up. We really stressed from the start of practice this year that we needed to be the team that could shut people down for a while, and at times we have played pretty well this year at the defensive end of the court. Duke's one of those teams that's really hard to defend because they have several options that are really legitimate options, it's not like it's [one] guy that might get hot. They have some proven guys. When you're playing against a team with the MVP of the Final Four last year for instance, you just go from there. Of course [Nolan] Smith is probably having as good a year as any guard in the country. To have two guys with their experience, a junior and a senior, leading your team is certainly a tremendous asset."

On Dino Gregory and Sean Mosley:
"Dino has just been a great story because he's continued to improve the whole time he's been here. Now he's a legitimate shooter from about 15-17 feet. He's always been a good defensive player and a tough rebounder. He gives us somebody to go along with Jordan Williams on the inside game. He can keep us in there on the glass against a team like Duke's size for example. He's been very valuable to us.

"Sean I think, he had as good a game as he's had all year against Georgia Tech. His last game he was really flying around [and] made some big shots for us. The thing with Sean is you know you're getting whatever he has to give. There's never any question about Sean's effort when he's on the court. It's great to know that as a coach to get a feel if you go into a game knowing you're going to get a great performance in terms of effort. It's a good feeling."