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Men's Basketball
vs Countdown to Craziness
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Quotes: Duke 98, Elon 72
12/20/2010 10:30:00 PM | Men's Basketball
Duke Head Coach Mike Krzyzewski
Opening Statement:
“Overall I was pleased with our team. When you're not playing two times a week, and you have a little bit of a break, and then you're going to have a break, and then you're playing a team, I think they're good. I think they're close to being a winning program because they play a really nice style and they can shoot and they play hard. For a team like ours, they put four perimeter guys in and they try to take advantage of that, and they did a few times. Overall, we did a pretty good job on the three-point shooting. Last game, they shot 33 threes. Half their shots this year are threes. So they had 58 shots, and only 19 of them were threes, so we did a pretty good job on that. And so that means the big guys have to be out there and talking and stuff like that. And then dealing with Nolan [Smith]'s foul trouble, you don't like it, but it's a good thing for us, because then Seth [Curry] did a really nice job and there's some game pressure then. Then he gets his fourth foul with 19 minutes to go. Crazier things happen. You know there are a lot of teams that have gotten beat. It's that Bermuda Triangle of the season, where strange things happen to teams around the country because there are so many breaks and a lot of things can happen. So overall, it was not a great performance, but a good performance. Again, they played well. They put you in positions where you have to defend and they broke us down and they got some really good shots. I thought our kids played hard the whole game. Give them credit. You know some times when you don't play well, it's because they're playing well. Obviously we're better, we have more talent. But, I mean, they use their talent well. They maximize their talent and they have good talent. I think they're going to be an up-and-coming program because they have a lot of young kids. The kid [Jack] Isenbarger is just a threat. You've got to be with him all the time. You can't, I'm not saying this that he wasn't fouled, you can't foul him because he's like 100 percent. You know, he's 100 percent. So that's a nice weapon to have. So again, I really liked what they did, and that was a good game for us.”
On Nolan Smith's absence from the game after foul trouble:
“Well, we tried to go to [Kyle Singler] right away just to give our team a little bit more confidence. You don't know what's going to happen when those things occur. And I thought we handled that fairly well. And then Nolan came back and played significant minutes with the four fouls. When he did, I mean, Nolan's really good. So when he's in there, we're just a better basketball team and they have a tough time defending him. Overall, good, and Kyle did a really nice job of that.”
On Nolan's style of play changing between halves:
“With the offense that we have, he has to touch the ball. And at times, in the first eight games, we're running up and down the court, which is good with that team. Sometimes he didn't touch the ball. Now he knows when he's going to get it. We call a lot of things, where he's not necessarily going to get the ball but be able to make a play. And that was good. And Kyle defended well. He went to the four and our defense just picked up dramatically. He's like a traffic cop up there talking. He's a beautiful player, but defensively, when he's doing that, he's a tremendous basketball player on the defensive end of the court.”
On tying Dean Smith with 879 career wins:
“You know it's an honor to have won that many games. I'm sure Dean would have said the same thing. It was an honor for him to win that many games. You know I have the utmost respect for Dean. The fact that we've been really good coaches in this league. We've been at our schools, you know he was at his school for a long time, and I've been here a long time, and I know we both realize we wouldn't have won this many games without being at these schools. Again, I know it's like a milestone, but I'm more interested in how we become a better team this year. But again, it's better to have it than to not have it. It means we would have lost. But it's not a big thing right now. A bigger thing is how we're developing our team, and that's the way it's always been.”
On comparisons between Coach K's and Dean Smith's programs:
“Yeah I think you learn from everybody. You know our league, and no disrespect for him, you know he was as good as there's been in basketball. You know, but the league that I came in had Terry Holland, and one of the great coaches of all time that never gotten his due is Lefty Dreisell. You know if Lefty would have stayed at Maryland, Lefty would have gotten 900 wins. Lefty's one of the great coaches, that, because he's never won a championship, has never really gotten his due. Jimmy [Valvano] and Bobby [Cremins] and the league was amazing and the head of it was Dean. We all made each other better because you had to be good to survive. And each game, well you guys, those of you who are old enough, you were there. Pretty intense. As intense as you might think today's game is, the 80s and early 90s, you know, not as many guys went pro early and so you had to become good or go onto TV. And Dean's never been in TV so. Look I love Dean and we competed really hard against one another. But I think the ultimate thing a competitor can say about another competitor is that he respects him 100 percent. I really value our friendship. And when two teams that are coached by two guys who are as competitive go after one another, you've got to make each other better. And in that respect, it made the ACC one hell of a conference. I mean no one's done a better job in the ACC, by far, than Dean. We've done our share, but what he did was set a standard that the league then had to adopt or else you drop by the wayside. He's one of the great pioneers. He built a program when no one else knew what the hell a program is. He built one hell of a program at a great school by recruiting unbelievably good kids, developing great relationships with them and then they played a brand of basketball where the showed up every night. And we've, I think, done a lot like that in our own way. And that's produced some unbelievably good basketball.”
Duke Senior Nolan Smith
“Elon played a great game. Offensively, they were very sharp. They ran their offense and they just broke us down. They got wide open shots, they penetrated, and they pretty much did whatever they wanted. Our defense wasn't there until the second half. They're a team that plays hard and plays together. They got after us.”
“They are a very precise team. They ran their offense well, and our talk wasn't there tonight defensively – a lot of defensive breakdowns where they were just getting whatever shots they wanted. We were leaving their three-point shooters open for threes, and they made shots. We have to get better. We don't want to make excuses or anything like that. We were prepared for the game, and we practiced hard all week, even with exams. There were just some things like energy, talk, things that we should always bring to a game that weren't there. We have to come back and be ready to go. When we come back, we have one game and then it's ACC time. We have to grow. We have to start talking. We're not as deep as we think. We're not as deep of a team with Kyrie [Irving] down. We just want everybody to step up, start talking, and be ready to play when we come back.”
On Coach Mike Krzyzewski's milestone win:
“The coaches don't say anything about it. The assistants, they really keep it quiet. Coach wants the focus to be on us instead of him, and that's just how he is. But we watch TV, we see it, so it's something that's great to be a part of.”
Duke Sophomore Ryan Kelly
“Every play I'm out there, I'm trying to play my hardest. If I can earn more time by doing that, that's great. Whatever added time it is, I'm going to play just as hard and when good things happen, that's good. I make mistakes too, so we'll see what happens.”
On the environment in the locker room after the game:
“It was definitely pretty tense. Coach [Mike Krzyzewski] was telling us we still have a long way to go to be the team that we're going to be and the team that we need to be to reach our goals. But we'll take these next few days to be with our family and then get right back at it.”
On Coach Mike Krzyzewski's milestone win:
“Coach doesn't say much about it obviously, but we know. It's an unbelievable accomplishment. And we also know he's going to be number one at some point. We congratulated him, and he's not one to take those accolades so well, but he's an unbelievable winner, an unbelievable competitor, and he's the best coach there ever was – and is.”
Duke Senior Kyle Singler
“As a team, we didn't play that well, but we did get the win. We did do things that we can take away that were good. But our defense really wasn't there. They got a lot of open shots, so I think our defense has to get a little bit better throughout the course of the year.”
On Coach Mike Krzyzewski's milestone win:
“It's just a great thing to be a part of. We're only a small piece of it, but to be the team to do it with is special and just shows how great Coach K is.”
“I think we're at a good spot. We could be in a better spot, but we've been playing good, not great. We've been having good practices. That was the main thing that last year's team had – we weren't that great in the beginning of the year, but progressively we got better throughout the year, and our practices were great. I think that's where this team is too. We're just going to have to keep on evolving and getting better throughout the whole year.”
On Nolan Smith's foul trouble in the game:
“There are going to be different things throughout the whole year that are going to happen, so the good thing for this team to learn is how to adjust while the game is going on and adjust to different situations. And we had to do that tonight. I thought we did a decent job.”
Elon Head Coach Matt Matheny
Opening Statement:
“We are in the beginning stages of building what we hope will be very special at Elon and our goal tonight was to be competitively tough for 40 minutes. We understood we were playing the No. 1 [Duke] team in the country. We understand the venue we were playing in and we understood all the adversity we would face coming in and I'm happy and proud that our guys were competitively tough for 40 minutes. What we just said to our players in the locker room is we are proud of you, but we want more and that's just where we are as a program. We want to be consistent with competitive toughness and we want to be able to be on the national stage more and we have to earn that right. So we're pointed in the right direction; we just have to continue to climb. Congratulations to Coach Krzyzewski on his milestone victory and to a very, very good Duke team.”
On whether or not he thought about more than keeping the game competitive at one point:
“We don't spend a lot of time ever in preparation for any opponent talking about we'd really want to go win this game or we want to keep from losing. We focus on the moment and we try to break games down. There was a point when we were down 13 that we had an opportunity in transition. We had a pretty good look from three and we turned it down and threw it in the paint for another opportunity inside. [Duke] made a great play and blocked a shot. We could have cut it to 11 there. I felt like if we could have done that, gotten it close to single digits, then you never know.”
On preparing for the atmosphere of Cameron:
“A lot of our guys have never been in this venue. In fact, I think about our roster, we played here last year in the preseason NIT, but we didn't play against Duke. There's, you guys know this because you see it a lot more than I do, but you walk in the building, the student section, the Crazies are already here. There's an electricity and our players haven't experienced that before. I watched them in warm-ups and I watched them come back in the locker room and you could see wide eyes, you could. But the more we get to experience that kind of atmosphere the better we are, we'll be at handling it and I felt like today was a very good starting point for that.”
On Elon's defense:
“You know they have great players. We talked a lot, and our players were convinced of this as we practiced preparing for this game, that we're going to play against great players and what we have to do is to be as good as we can be on any given possession or any given round and we have to do that as often as we possibly can. Whether you're playing against an All-American or a National Player of the Year candidate, a great, great player, you're going to do that, do the best you can do and I thought our guys played in the moment and did that for the most part.”
On what he has learned from Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski:
“I read some of his books. I have been in this venue a lot as an assistant coach and I have a ton of respect, a lot of respect for the way his teams play. I've watched them for years. I grew up in North Carolina. I grew up watching ACC basketball and I have always been a fan of his teams. But the thing that stands out to me about him the most is that he is a great leader. He is a leader of men. To me that is a great role model. That's what I told him after the game; he is an incredible role model for coaches and he is at the height of the profession, not only a national champion, he's a national coach and I love the pride he takes in being the national coach.”
Opening Statement:
“Overall I was pleased with our team. When you're not playing two times a week, and you have a little bit of a break, and then you're going to have a break, and then you're playing a team, I think they're good. I think they're close to being a winning program because they play a really nice style and they can shoot and they play hard. For a team like ours, they put four perimeter guys in and they try to take advantage of that, and they did a few times. Overall, we did a pretty good job on the three-point shooting. Last game, they shot 33 threes. Half their shots this year are threes. So they had 58 shots, and only 19 of them were threes, so we did a pretty good job on that. And so that means the big guys have to be out there and talking and stuff like that. And then dealing with Nolan [Smith]'s foul trouble, you don't like it, but it's a good thing for us, because then Seth [Curry] did a really nice job and there's some game pressure then. Then he gets his fourth foul with 19 minutes to go. Crazier things happen. You know there are a lot of teams that have gotten beat. It's that Bermuda Triangle of the season, where strange things happen to teams around the country because there are so many breaks and a lot of things can happen. So overall, it was not a great performance, but a good performance. Again, they played well. They put you in positions where you have to defend and they broke us down and they got some really good shots. I thought our kids played hard the whole game. Give them credit. You know some times when you don't play well, it's because they're playing well. Obviously we're better, we have more talent. But, I mean, they use their talent well. They maximize their talent and they have good talent. I think they're going to be an up-and-coming program because they have a lot of young kids. The kid [Jack] Isenbarger is just a threat. You've got to be with him all the time. You can't, I'm not saying this that he wasn't fouled, you can't foul him because he's like 100 percent. You know, he's 100 percent. So that's a nice weapon to have. So again, I really liked what they did, and that was a good game for us.”
On Nolan Smith's absence from the game after foul trouble:
“Well, we tried to go to [Kyle Singler] right away just to give our team a little bit more confidence. You don't know what's going to happen when those things occur. And I thought we handled that fairly well. And then Nolan came back and played significant minutes with the four fouls. When he did, I mean, Nolan's really good. So when he's in there, we're just a better basketball team and they have a tough time defending him. Overall, good, and Kyle did a really nice job of that.”
On Nolan's style of play changing between halves:
“With the offense that we have, he has to touch the ball. And at times, in the first eight games, we're running up and down the court, which is good with that team. Sometimes he didn't touch the ball. Now he knows when he's going to get it. We call a lot of things, where he's not necessarily going to get the ball but be able to make a play. And that was good. And Kyle defended well. He went to the four and our defense just picked up dramatically. He's like a traffic cop up there talking. He's a beautiful player, but defensively, when he's doing that, he's a tremendous basketball player on the defensive end of the court.”
On tying Dean Smith with 879 career wins:
“You know it's an honor to have won that many games. I'm sure Dean would have said the same thing. It was an honor for him to win that many games. You know I have the utmost respect for Dean. The fact that we've been really good coaches in this league. We've been at our schools, you know he was at his school for a long time, and I've been here a long time, and I know we both realize we wouldn't have won this many games without being at these schools. Again, I know it's like a milestone, but I'm more interested in how we become a better team this year. But again, it's better to have it than to not have it. It means we would have lost. But it's not a big thing right now. A bigger thing is how we're developing our team, and that's the way it's always been.”
On comparisons between Coach K's and Dean Smith's programs:
“Yeah I think you learn from everybody. You know our league, and no disrespect for him, you know he was as good as there's been in basketball. You know, but the league that I came in had Terry Holland, and one of the great coaches of all time that never gotten his due is Lefty Dreisell. You know if Lefty would have stayed at Maryland, Lefty would have gotten 900 wins. Lefty's one of the great coaches, that, because he's never won a championship, has never really gotten his due. Jimmy [Valvano] and Bobby [Cremins] and the league was amazing and the head of it was Dean. We all made each other better because you had to be good to survive. And each game, well you guys, those of you who are old enough, you were there. Pretty intense. As intense as you might think today's game is, the 80s and early 90s, you know, not as many guys went pro early and so you had to become good or go onto TV. And Dean's never been in TV so. Look I love Dean and we competed really hard against one another. But I think the ultimate thing a competitor can say about another competitor is that he respects him 100 percent. I really value our friendship. And when two teams that are coached by two guys who are as competitive go after one another, you've got to make each other better. And in that respect, it made the ACC one hell of a conference. I mean no one's done a better job in the ACC, by far, than Dean. We've done our share, but what he did was set a standard that the league then had to adopt or else you drop by the wayside. He's one of the great pioneers. He built a program when no one else knew what the hell a program is. He built one hell of a program at a great school by recruiting unbelievably good kids, developing great relationships with them and then they played a brand of basketball where the showed up every night. And we've, I think, done a lot like that in our own way. And that's produced some unbelievably good basketball.”
Duke Senior Nolan Smith
“Elon played a great game. Offensively, they were very sharp. They ran their offense and they just broke us down. They got wide open shots, they penetrated, and they pretty much did whatever they wanted. Our defense wasn't there until the second half. They're a team that plays hard and plays together. They got after us.”
“They are a very precise team. They ran their offense well, and our talk wasn't there tonight defensively – a lot of defensive breakdowns where they were just getting whatever shots they wanted. We were leaving their three-point shooters open for threes, and they made shots. We have to get better. We don't want to make excuses or anything like that. We were prepared for the game, and we practiced hard all week, even with exams. There were just some things like energy, talk, things that we should always bring to a game that weren't there. We have to come back and be ready to go. When we come back, we have one game and then it's ACC time. We have to grow. We have to start talking. We're not as deep as we think. We're not as deep of a team with Kyrie [Irving] down. We just want everybody to step up, start talking, and be ready to play when we come back.”
On Coach Mike Krzyzewski's milestone win:
“The coaches don't say anything about it. The assistants, they really keep it quiet. Coach wants the focus to be on us instead of him, and that's just how he is. But we watch TV, we see it, so it's something that's great to be a part of.”
Duke Sophomore Ryan Kelly
“Every play I'm out there, I'm trying to play my hardest. If I can earn more time by doing that, that's great. Whatever added time it is, I'm going to play just as hard and when good things happen, that's good. I make mistakes too, so we'll see what happens.”
On the environment in the locker room after the game:
“It was definitely pretty tense. Coach [Mike Krzyzewski] was telling us we still have a long way to go to be the team that we're going to be and the team that we need to be to reach our goals. But we'll take these next few days to be with our family and then get right back at it.”
On Coach Mike Krzyzewski's milestone win:
“Coach doesn't say much about it obviously, but we know. It's an unbelievable accomplishment. And we also know he's going to be number one at some point. We congratulated him, and he's not one to take those accolades so well, but he's an unbelievable winner, an unbelievable competitor, and he's the best coach there ever was – and is.”
Duke Senior Kyle Singler
“As a team, we didn't play that well, but we did get the win. We did do things that we can take away that were good. But our defense really wasn't there. They got a lot of open shots, so I think our defense has to get a little bit better throughout the course of the year.”
On Coach Mike Krzyzewski's milestone win:
“It's just a great thing to be a part of. We're only a small piece of it, but to be the team to do it with is special and just shows how great Coach K is.”
“I think we're at a good spot. We could be in a better spot, but we've been playing good, not great. We've been having good practices. That was the main thing that last year's team had – we weren't that great in the beginning of the year, but progressively we got better throughout the year, and our practices were great. I think that's where this team is too. We're just going to have to keep on evolving and getting better throughout the whole year.”
On Nolan Smith's foul trouble in the game:
“There are going to be different things throughout the whole year that are going to happen, so the good thing for this team to learn is how to adjust while the game is going on and adjust to different situations. And we had to do that tonight. I thought we did a decent job.”
Elon Head Coach Matt Matheny
Opening Statement:
“We are in the beginning stages of building what we hope will be very special at Elon and our goal tonight was to be competitively tough for 40 minutes. We understood we were playing the No. 1 [Duke] team in the country. We understand the venue we were playing in and we understood all the adversity we would face coming in and I'm happy and proud that our guys were competitively tough for 40 minutes. What we just said to our players in the locker room is we are proud of you, but we want more and that's just where we are as a program. We want to be consistent with competitive toughness and we want to be able to be on the national stage more and we have to earn that right. So we're pointed in the right direction; we just have to continue to climb. Congratulations to Coach Krzyzewski on his milestone victory and to a very, very good Duke team.”
On whether or not he thought about more than keeping the game competitive at one point:
“We don't spend a lot of time ever in preparation for any opponent talking about we'd really want to go win this game or we want to keep from losing. We focus on the moment and we try to break games down. There was a point when we were down 13 that we had an opportunity in transition. We had a pretty good look from three and we turned it down and threw it in the paint for another opportunity inside. [Duke] made a great play and blocked a shot. We could have cut it to 11 there. I felt like if we could have done that, gotten it close to single digits, then you never know.”
On preparing for the atmosphere of Cameron:
“A lot of our guys have never been in this venue. In fact, I think about our roster, we played here last year in the preseason NIT, but we didn't play against Duke. There's, you guys know this because you see it a lot more than I do, but you walk in the building, the student section, the Crazies are already here. There's an electricity and our players haven't experienced that before. I watched them in warm-ups and I watched them come back in the locker room and you could see wide eyes, you could. But the more we get to experience that kind of atmosphere the better we are, we'll be at handling it and I felt like today was a very good starting point for that.”
On Elon's defense:
“You know they have great players. We talked a lot, and our players were convinced of this as we practiced preparing for this game, that we're going to play against great players and what we have to do is to be as good as we can be on any given possession or any given round and we have to do that as often as we possibly can. Whether you're playing against an All-American or a National Player of the Year candidate, a great, great player, you're going to do that, do the best you can do and I thought our guys played in the moment and did that for the most part.”
On what he has learned from Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski:
“I read some of his books. I have been in this venue a lot as an assistant coach and I have a ton of respect, a lot of respect for the way his teams play. I've watched them for years. I grew up in North Carolina. I grew up watching ACC basketball and I have always been a fan of his teams. But the thing that stands out to me about him the most is that he is a great leader. He is a leader of men. To me that is a great role model. That's what I told him after the game; he is an incredible role model for coaches and he is at the height of the profession, not only a national champion, he's a national coach and I love the pride he takes in being the national coach.”
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