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Quotes: Duke 77, Maryland 56
2/13/2010 4:00:00 PM | Men's Basketball
Duke Head Coach Mike Krzyzewski
Opening Statement:
“Well it was a big-time win for our team. I love Gary [Williams] and what he has done with his program. We are very close friends and his team is playing lights for us to beat him today, which meant that we had to play lights out. They are the most experienced of all the ACC teams. They have six guys on their team that at one time or another started last year. And they play like it…they play like it. I thought our defense was outstanding today and Brian [Zoubek] was spectacular. He had 16 points, 17 rebounds…cleaned up a lot, eight offensive boards. And they were such uplifting buckets. He was even playing above the rim. No, he was above the rim a couple times. Anyways, I am going to try to figure out what he did last night, what he had for training meal. He is having them all the time now. When a player, especially a senior…our senior class is just rock-solid guys. They are just sensational guys and such team players and Brian has been such a good teammate and a good player. He has played really well all year. Today, that was a great basketball game. He played a great game and he was kind of the difference there because we weren't hitting as well in other areas. Jon [Scheyer] especially towards the end, was really spectacular himself. It was tough to score because they are a real good defensive team and Brian's buckets gave us such a lift. Anyways, really happy, obviously it's a honor to have coached 1,000 games here and what I said afterwards, it's been a real privilege and honor for me to represent this great university. I could not have had a better place to coach, that was more of who I want to be, I'm not saying I'm like Duke, but I want to be like Duke. So, it's been really good. It was a nice thing today.”
On how the team handled the game today and evaluating the play:
“Yeah what we talked about is…forget about birthday, 1,000 [games], 70 years of Cameron, all that. We're playing Maryland. You have to play for you, play for what you are doing right now with this unit and if you do that and win, then those other things are neat. I don't think you can play for a bunch of other stuff, you have to own the game. I think my team is a great group of kids, but to ask them to win because it is my birthday, I think that's a stretch. As [Greivis] Vasquez is trying to go by you or you go up for rebound and get hit in the mouth…'I'm going to do this for Coack K'…I don't think that happens. I think when they take ownership of the game, which they have, it was their game and they allowed us to share it on a pretty neat day. That is the way we try to approach it.”
On Gary Williams' comments on Zoubek's development as a player over his four years:
“Gary and I are the same vintage, where you appreciate a senior's contributions, so it doesn't surprise me that he said that. Remember, Brian has been hurt a lot in his career. For over a year, off and on, he was either playing or…for more than a year… coming off a broken foot. He has been completely healthy and has taken great care of himself. Today, it is obvious to everybody what he did, but really, he has had an outstanding year thus far. He knows what we are doing. He is a very good talker out on the court, not to the other team, but to his team. He knows where people are supposed to be. He is a very intelligent player.”
On Zoubek starting and the possibility of that continuing:
“We just felt with…we didn't know that Lance [Thomas] would be able to play until late and Lance brings such energy to our team and defense and even though that he is playing, he is not playing at 100 percent. I just felt and the staff felt that we needed another veteran in there. Brian would be, the two of them together, would give us that energy. Whether he would start, he still would play the same amount of minutes, unless we were playing Georgetown and we stink and they are in a spread. Pretty much Brian has played 15-16 minutes or whatever, and today it was 22. That is why we did it.”
On when the team knew that Lance Thomas would play:
“Late yesterday. We knew it wasn't an ACL [injury]. All of you have played sports, when you bang knees with somebody, it hurts like the dickens for awhile and then you walked it off. It was he and [North Carolina player Dexter Strickland], not on purpose or anything, it came to the side of his knee, so there was a huge bruise there. When we got back here after the game, he could flex his quad. If there is something structurally wrong, then the quad won't fire up, you can't make a muscle out of it. We were encouraged that he could make a muscle and he went for an MRI scan, x-rays and then Lance is a tough guy. He earned his spot and after practice yesterday and I said, 'What do you think?' He said, 'I want to play,' and I told him it was his decision, if you want to play you will play. You have earned it. I would never stop a kid who wants to play, as long as the doctors were ok with it. But he is not 100 percent, hopefully these couple days will help him.”
Senior Brian Zoubek
“It definitely is [the best game of my career]. It feels great. I'm just playing a lot more aggressive and just feel good out there. I feel like I'm in really good shape, and it's been a long time since I've been all together.”
On starting the game tonight:
“I think it added a little extra motivation. I wanted to secure my spot and make sure they know that when I'm in there, I'm going to be helping the team. I did that tonight.”
“It feels really good to get this win with everything we had going on. Taking first place in the league, Coach's birthday, his 1,000th game, you can pick any number of 100 reasons why we wanted to win this game. [Coach K] works so hard for us. He's in here every single night watching hundreds of hours of tape. It's just ridiculous – I couldn't do it. He works so hard for us, and we love to give him a gift like that back. It feels really good.”
“This was definitely a matchup [against Maryland] that I wouldn't have played in the past years. They would've spread it out a little bit. It just proves that my footwork has gotten a lot better and I can handle it. I'm just happy to be able to be out there on the court.”
On his active play and second half dunk:
“I've gotten some extra running in and my legs are a little stronger. In the past, I could get up [to the rim], I was just too tired once I ran down the court. Being in better shape really helps that. It's just being consistent in terms of not taking a day off in my conditioning and just being a senior about it and making sure I don't fall out of shape.”
Senior Jon Scheyer
“We really want to protect our home court. Outside of my freshman year, we've done that pretty much since I've been here. This year, as an older, veteran group, you really feel that much more pride and wanting to not lose at home. I think we've done a better job of handling the game situation at home than away from Cameron just because it's a little easier to communicate. But we need to be able to do that outside of here also.”
On how Brian Zoubek's performance can help the play of Duke's big three – Scheyer, Singler, Smith:
“They talk about us three because we score, but obviously we have guys who do so many things. Zoubs, he's done a great job for us all year, and obviously I'm happy for him that he had a breakout game. But his defense has been there the whole year. He's been there the whole year. It just took a big game like this for everybody to notice. Defensively, I thought he was huge, just being big inside and creating some extra possessions for us. He screens really well for us too and takes pressure off of us. I just can't say enough about him as a teammate and as a player.”
“[Coach Mike Krzyzewski] deserved a great game today, and we really wanted to play the way he wants his players to play. I thought we did a good job of that today, playing defense, rebounding, playing hard. We just wanted to do that for him and we were happy to get the win.”
Junior Kyle Singler
On Brian Zoubek's performance:
“He played great tonight. We do have a pretty solid group of guys, but Brian did a great job on the boards. He found himself around the bucket, and he's seven feet, a big guy, so it's tough to move him. He does a great job of putting himself in a position to get the boards and put the ball back in the hole.”
“We try to just make good players like [Maryland's Greivis] Vasquez do things they're not comfortable with - just try to speed him up, small things. We tried to do those things, and Nolan did a great job of following what he was supposed to do. We just helped him out as much as possible.”
When asked if winning the ACC regular season title matters:
“Of course it does. The object of the game is to win and play the best basketball that you can. I thought we played decent basketball tonight. As long as you can improve and win, you build confidence. We haven't won a regular season championship, so that's one of our goals and we're just trying to chip away at it.”
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.”
Opening Statement:
“Well it was a big-time win for our team. I love Gary [Williams] and what he has done with his program. We are very close friends and his team is playing lights for us to beat him today, which meant that we had to play lights out. They are the most experienced of all the ACC teams. They have six guys on their team that at one time or another started last year. And they play like it…they play like it. I thought our defense was outstanding today and Brian [Zoubek] was spectacular. He had 16 points, 17 rebounds…cleaned up a lot, eight offensive boards. And they were such uplifting buckets. He was even playing above the rim. No, he was above the rim a couple times. Anyways, I am going to try to figure out what he did last night, what he had for training meal. He is having them all the time now. When a player, especially a senior…our senior class is just rock-solid guys. They are just sensational guys and such team players and Brian has been such a good teammate and a good player. He has played really well all year. Today, that was a great basketball game. He played a great game and he was kind of the difference there because we weren't hitting as well in other areas. Jon [Scheyer] especially towards the end, was really spectacular himself. It was tough to score because they are a real good defensive team and Brian's buckets gave us such a lift. Anyways, really happy, obviously it's a honor to have coached 1,000 games here and what I said afterwards, it's been a real privilege and honor for me to represent this great university. I could not have had a better place to coach, that was more of who I want to be, I'm not saying I'm like Duke, but I want to be like Duke. So, it's been really good. It was a nice thing today.”
On how the team handled the game today and evaluating the play:
“Yeah what we talked about is…forget about birthday, 1,000 [games], 70 years of Cameron, all that. We're playing Maryland. You have to play for you, play for what you are doing right now with this unit and if you do that and win, then those other things are neat. I don't think you can play for a bunch of other stuff, you have to own the game. I think my team is a great group of kids, but to ask them to win because it is my birthday, I think that's a stretch. As [Greivis] Vasquez is trying to go by you or you go up for rebound and get hit in the mouth…'I'm going to do this for Coack K'…I don't think that happens. I think when they take ownership of the game, which they have, it was their game and they allowed us to share it on a pretty neat day. That is the way we try to approach it.”
On Gary Williams' comments on Zoubek's development as a player over his four years:
“Gary and I are the same vintage, where you appreciate a senior's contributions, so it doesn't surprise me that he said that. Remember, Brian has been hurt a lot in his career. For over a year, off and on, he was either playing or…for more than a year… coming off a broken foot. He has been completely healthy and has taken great care of himself. Today, it is obvious to everybody what he did, but really, he has had an outstanding year thus far. He knows what we are doing. He is a very good talker out on the court, not to the other team, but to his team. He knows where people are supposed to be. He is a very intelligent player.”
On Zoubek starting and the possibility of that continuing:
“We just felt with…we didn't know that Lance [Thomas] would be able to play until late and Lance brings such energy to our team and defense and even though that he is playing, he is not playing at 100 percent. I just felt and the staff felt that we needed another veteran in there. Brian would be, the two of them together, would give us that energy. Whether he would start, he still would play the same amount of minutes, unless we were playing Georgetown and we stink and they are in a spread. Pretty much Brian has played 15-16 minutes or whatever, and today it was 22. That is why we did it.”
On when the team knew that Lance Thomas would play:
“Late yesterday. We knew it wasn't an ACL [injury]. All of you have played sports, when you bang knees with somebody, it hurts like the dickens for awhile and then you walked it off. It was he and [North Carolina player Dexter Strickland], not on purpose or anything, it came to the side of his knee, so there was a huge bruise there. When we got back here after the game, he could flex his quad. If there is something structurally wrong, then the quad won't fire up, you can't make a muscle out of it. We were encouraged that he could make a muscle and he went for an MRI scan, x-rays and then Lance is a tough guy. He earned his spot and after practice yesterday and I said, 'What do you think?' He said, 'I want to play,' and I told him it was his decision, if you want to play you will play. You have earned it. I would never stop a kid who wants to play, as long as the doctors were ok with it. But he is not 100 percent, hopefully these couple days will help him.”
Senior Brian Zoubek
“It definitely is [the best game of my career]. It feels great. I'm just playing a lot more aggressive and just feel good out there. I feel like I'm in really good shape, and it's been a long time since I've been all together.”
On starting the game tonight:
“I think it added a little extra motivation. I wanted to secure my spot and make sure they know that when I'm in there, I'm going to be helping the team. I did that tonight.”
“It feels really good to get this win with everything we had going on. Taking first place in the league, Coach's birthday, his 1,000th game, you can pick any number of 100 reasons why we wanted to win this game. [Coach K] works so hard for us. He's in here every single night watching hundreds of hours of tape. It's just ridiculous – I couldn't do it. He works so hard for us, and we love to give him a gift like that back. It feels really good.”
“This was definitely a matchup [against Maryland] that I wouldn't have played in the past years. They would've spread it out a little bit. It just proves that my footwork has gotten a lot better and I can handle it. I'm just happy to be able to be out there on the court.”
On his active play and second half dunk:
“I've gotten some extra running in and my legs are a little stronger. In the past, I could get up [to the rim], I was just too tired once I ran down the court. Being in better shape really helps that. It's just being consistent in terms of not taking a day off in my conditioning and just being a senior about it and making sure I don't fall out of shape.”
Senior Jon Scheyer
“We really want to protect our home court. Outside of my freshman year, we've done that pretty much since I've been here. This year, as an older, veteran group, you really feel that much more pride and wanting to not lose at home. I think we've done a better job of handling the game situation at home than away from Cameron just because it's a little easier to communicate. But we need to be able to do that outside of here also.”
On how Brian Zoubek's performance can help the play of Duke's big three – Scheyer, Singler, Smith:
“They talk about us three because we score, but obviously we have guys who do so many things. Zoubs, he's done a great job for us all year, and obviously I'm happy for him that he had a breakout game. But his defense has been there the whole year. He's been there the whole year. It just took a big game like this for everybody to notice. Defensively, I thought he was huge, just being big inside and creating some extra possessions for us. He screens really well for us too and takes pressure off of us. I just can't say enough about him as a teammate and as a player.”
“[Coach Mike Krzyzewski] deserved a great game today, and we really wanted to play the way he wants his players to play. I thought we did a good job of that today, playing defense, rebounding, playing hard. We just wanted to do that for him and we were happy to get the win.”
Junior Kyle Singler
On Brian Zoubek's performance:
“He played great tonight. We do have a pretty solid group of guys, but Brian did a great job on the boards. He found himself around the bucket, and he's seven feet, a big guy, so it's tough to move him. He does a great job of putting himself in a position to get the boards and put the ball back in the hole.”
“We try to just make good players like [Maryland's Greivis] Vasquez do things they're not comfortable with - just try to speed him up, small things. We tried to do those things, and Nolan did a great job of following what he was supposed to do. We just helped him out as much as possible.”
When asked if winning the ACC regular season title matters:
“Of course it does. The object of the game is to win and play the best basketball that you can. I thought we played decent basketball tonight. As long as you can improve and win, you build confidence. We haven't won a regular season championship, so that's one of our goals and we're just trying to chip away at it.”
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.”
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