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Quotes: Duke 78, Clemson 56
2/21/2015 7:13:00 PM | Men's Basketball
Duke Head Coach Mike Krzyzewski
Opening Statement:
“It was a big win. I cannot be prouder of my team. That was one of the best wins we've had here in a long time. After Syracuse and North Carolina, the emotional wins, and Jahlil [Okafor]'s injury, we're down to seven guys. For us to play like this is spectacular. I'm so proud of them. They adjusted to a different game plan and our three-quarter court press worked very well. Quinn [Cook], I'm not sure anyone in the league has played better than Quinn and he did it again today. Justise [Winslow] had a spectacular game, but all the kids played. Marshall [Plumlee] gave us a huge 24 minutes with his physicality and energy. Grayson [Allen] keeps coming on and, again, I'm proud of my guys. I wasn't sure what was going to happen today and what I got was a spectacular performance by this team. A great seven guys.”
On the momentum shift:
“They missed some shots. A lot of it is what you do, but some of it is that they missed. They had some good looks, but they missed. The good thing for us is once we got a three-point lead we didn't let up. We had a good end-of-half with Quinn scoring. We had a great response when it got down to 10, we started hitting some threes. We ran offense. We called a timeout before a timeout and when it got down to 10, our guys had a great three-point response and that helped. Our guys are tired. You don't go through all this stuff with the limited amount of guys and how young our guys are without being tired. Seeing the ball go in made the defense play a little better and we got some steals and run-outs. When you get some lay-ups and hit a couple of threes, the world is really good.”
On Jahlil Okafor:
“He could not play today, but there's nothing structurally wrong. He has a sprain. During the game he's not going to get the swelling because he's taped and the adrenaline is going, but it's more of getting the swelling out of there. He's a big guy, obviously, and he keeps improving every day. We're hoping that he'll be able to play by Wednesday. He's such a great kid. We tried to not do a lot of physical stuff. Thursday, we couldn't do anything except giving a preview of this game. Friday, we had a short practice in the afternoon and came back at night to walk through our game plan. We did that again this morning. Last night, we kind of knew. You could see tears in his eyes. The kid wanted to play so badly. We talked to him about not feeling guilty, you're not letting anybody down. We wanted to wait until today because our staff does such a great job. We've seen them produce miracles. If he was ready to play, we would play him. He just wasn't ready to play today.”
On the press:
“We have it, so if we feel we need it we will use it. Our theme for today was 'Strong Together.' Sometimes when you're playing man-to-man, it gets to be 'this is my man.' We thought that with the three-quarter court pick-up in two different ways with the 2-2-1 and the 1-2-2 after free throws we could be strong without getting hurt further up the court and hopefully be strong when we got to half court. Our guys worked. Basically, they knew they had each other's back. Today things worked really well. I think they saw that Clemson had a hard time attacking it. They got through it, but they had a hard time attacking it and then you could set up another defense. Every once in awhile you could be even more aggressive because there wasn't an attack, it was just beat it across half court. It's all on our guys. You can do whatever you want, but if they aren't playing hard and smart you can't make the thing go and they did that today.”
On the crowd:
“I've been here a long time. After a Carolina game, especially if you won, people aren't as hungry. It was great to see the place full and there was energy. You have to deal with reality. We either have eight or seven guys. I've never done that before. That's not a lot. We need all the emotional support we can get. They responded, so that was good.”
On Quinn Cook:
“I'm not saying he's Bobby Hurley as far as the type of player, but Hurley never got tired. Quinn doesn't get tired. Quinn is in unbelievable shape. He works at it, but there's something in it. He had a couple of big threes.”
On Tyus Jones:
“He's terrific. He has great poise, he's never afraid and he understands the game. He has to talk and people will listen to him. At times he'll defer. He passed up a three in the last game and guys got on him, but next time he hit it. Quinn has been superb with him. That relationship has exceeded what I could have ever thought would happen. I thought it was going to be good, it exceeded that. They are very close and together. Quinn sees stuff, and he sees it better when he doesn't have the ball.”
Duke Senior Quinn Cook
On Duke's up tempo play today:
“It was just the way we were on defense. Our defense just led to some fast break points. When myself, Tyus [Jones], Matt [Jones], Grayson [Allen], or Justise [Winslow], get the ball, we want to push it. We were smaller today and Justise got it going early. He kind of started the tempo off and we just kept feeding off what he was doing.”
“We started off the first four minutes and Coach [Mike Krzyzewski] got on us. We snapped out of it and got after it defensively, which led to great offense. Justise [Winslow] played one of his best games thus far. He kind of got us started off, and myself and Tyus were trying to pressure [Clemson's guards]. The bigs were doing a great job of talking to us, so it was a total team effort.”
On the play in the second half when Jahlil Okafor picked Cook up when he was on the floor after a three-point shot:
“He picked me up. He's strong – that's what we were joking on the bench. He's so strong. It was a good sequence. I get excited about that stuff, seeing Coach [Mike Krzyzewski] jumping and hugging Nolan [Smith], hugging Kyle Singler. That's stuff that I dreamed about happening, so while we're here in the moment, we want to take full advantage of it. I could hear [Jahlil Okafor] talking on defense the whole time. For him to be engaged the whole time, it says a lot about him, not being frustrated about him missing tonight. I know he's waiting to get back on Wednesday.”
On his conditioning and the need to play a lot of minutes:
“That's the shape you've got to be in. I think I'm in good shape. I stay here all summer, working with our strength coach. Just taking care of your body, eating, sleeping, all that goes into it. I feel great out there, and I don't get tired, myself or Tyus [Jones]. We're going to need to do that because we only have eight [scholarship] guys.”
Duke Freshman Justise Winslow
“With Jah [Okafor] out today, we went with a little smaller lineup, played a lot more zone on defense, and offensively we had a lot of mismatches that we could take advantage of. That's what we tried to do. We were small, and we tried to use our quickness and the press to our advantage, and it worked out today.”
“I try to stay aggressive every game, but especially this game with Jah [Okafor] out. Q [Quinn Cook] had to step up, I had to step up, we all had to step up. I think just me being aggressive really helped out the team – defensively and offensively. I got some deflections on the defensive end and just tried to get into the lane and make plays, whether that was finishing or kicking out to shooters.”
When asked if Duke was focused on avoiding a letdown after Wednesday night's game against North Carolina:
“Coach [Mike Krzyzewski] kind of reiterated that point, but we just try to come out here and win every game. After big games, sometimes we come out a little sluggish, but tonight we came out, we fought hard, we competed. [We were] missing Jah [Okafor], but we didn't let that get the best of us, and we came out with the W.”
When asked what his reaction was when he heard that Duke's Jahlil Okafor would not play today:
“I didn't know the status of it, but I just knew that if he was going to play or if he wasn't going to play, we were more than capable of beating Clemson tonight.”
On Duke's play without Jahlil Okafor in the lineup:
“In that Notre Dame game, when we went on that big run, for a lot of that, Marshall [Plumlee] was in for Jah [Okafor]. If we have him, if we don't, we've got more than enough weapons to get the job done. Of course we would love to have Jah. He's a special player. Everybody in the country would love to have him. We want to get him back soon, but if we can't have him, I think we can figure out ways to get wins. I think it's just every man stepping up. Tonight Q [Quinn Cook] played great. He knocked down a lot of shots. Tyus [Jones] played pretty well and Marshall [Plumlee] gave us a lot of good minutes. If Jah is out, then it's next man up.”
Duke Freshman Tyus Jones
“Without Jahlil [Okafor] in there, we were smaller so we were trying to pick up the pace. We felt that that defense that we played today, trying to get our hands in passing lanes and get deflections, can speed it up and get the tempo how we wanted it. I don't know if they were caught off guard, but we executed well. They've got some physical guys on that team, and we were able to force turnovers and not let them muscle us or get easy shots.”
Clemson Head Coach Brad Brownell
Opening Statement:
“Well first off, just give Mike [Krzyzewski] and the Duke staff and players a lot of credit. They played well tonight, obviously not having Jahlil [Okafor], they overcame it. It wasn't a problem at all. We got off to decent starts in both halves, but we just didn't play very well. The guards didn't play well. The soft press bothered us all game. We acted like we've never seen that before, and it just threw us out of rhythm a bit. I thought we played scared, to be honest with you, at various points in the game, and probably didn't compete as well as we normally do. I'm a little bit disappointed in our team today.”
On any strategy changes due to Jahlil Okafor's injury:
“No because I had 20 minutes to figure it out. Obviously, we practiced for two days on how to guard him and how we're going to guard with him. You know, it's not completely different, but it's vastly different with a smaller team and more spacing and driving angles and we knew that was going to happen, but our inability to score and our turnovers and just how passive we were offensively was what really led to our defense not being very good. We're usually better than that, but we let our poor offense, and frustration, and poor play just affect our defense. We gave up, and just didn't fight as hard as we normally do. We faced adversity in both halves. We started the game alright; we started the second half fine, but then we hit patches of adversity and some of our decision-making and ball-handling mistakes were just really poor. They got a bunch of fast-break points, and you can't beat Duke that way.”
On playing against Duke's zone:
“We thought he would play a little bit with Okafor not in the game, but we didn't handle it great, so he just stayed in the whole time. I think we went one possession man-to-man and he scored and went right back to the zone and that was it.”
On Jaron Blossomgame's ankle:
“It's sore. He didn't practice yesterday, and he did a few things in shoot around today just to know that he could go. The adrenaline from playing in Cameron is what, I'm sure, helped make him want to play. I don't think he was completely healthy at all, but he wasn't at risk of any further damage or anything like that. He wasn't quite as explosive as he normally is. He played 22 minutes, so he didn't play as much, but he wanted to play and he was fine to go out there and compete.”
On Gabe DeVoe's performance:
“He's just practiced really well the last month. I think he's more confident. He's made more shots and I thought he showed good poise. I've been trying to get him a few more minutes. He played 20 minutes today. He had one assist, one turnover, and two baskets. I thought he played pretty well, and I thought he outplayed most of the other guards on the team.”
On Duke playing with the momentum:
“The poor offense and transition defense. I thought they got a lot of long rebounds. I didn't think we got many of the 50-50 balls today. I thought they were quicker to the ball. I thought that they played with positive momentum, and once you start playing with momentum in this place as a home team, it's going to be hard to turn that around. You gotta get control of the game a bit, you gotta keep the crowd relatively quiet, and it's pretty easy to play with a double-figure lead the whole game. There's no pressure on the shots, and we weren't good enough today. I think we cut it once in the second half maybe to 10, maybe it was 12, but we need to get it to seven or eight to get them to think a little bit, but we weren't able to do it.”
Opening Statement:
“It was a big win. I cannot be prouder of my team. That was one of the best wins we've had here in a long time. After Syracuse and North Carolina, the emotional wins, and Jahlil [Okafor]'s injury, we're down to seven guys. For us to play like this is spectacular. I'm so proud of them. They adjusted to a different game plan and our three-quarter court press worked very well. Quinn [Cook], I'm not sure anyone in the league has played better than Quinn and he did it again today. Justise [Winslow] had a spectacular game, but all the kids played. Marshall [Plumlee] gave us a huge 24 minutes with his physicality and energy. Grayson [Allen] keeps coming on and, again, I'm proud of my guys. I wasn't sure what was going to happen today and what I got was a spectacular performance by this team. A great seven guys.”
On the momentum shift:
“They missed some shots. A lot of it is what you do, but some of it is that they missed. They had some good looks, but they missed. The good thing for us is once we got a three-point lead we didn't let up. We had a good end-of-half with Quinn scoring. We had a great response when it got down to 10, we started hitting some threes. We ran offense. We called a timeout before a timeout and when it got down to 10, our guys had a great three-point response and that helped. Our guys are tired. You don't go through all this stuff with the limited amount of guys and how young our guys are without being tired. Seeing the ball go in made the defense play a little better and we got some steals and run-outs. When you get some lay-ups and hit a couple of threes, the world is really good.”
On Jahlil Okafor:
“He could not play today, but there's nothing structurally wrong. He has a sprain. During the game he's not going to get the swelling because he's taped and the adrenaline is going, but it's more of getting the swelling out of there. He's a big guy, obviously, and he keeps improving every day. We're hoping that he'll be able to play by Wednesday. He's such a great kid. We tried to not do a lot of physical stuff. Thursday, we couldn't do anything except giving a preview of this game. Friday, we had a short practice in the afternoon and came back at night to walk through our game plan. We did that again this morning. Last night, we kind of knew. You could see tears in his eyes. The kid wanted to play so badly. We talked to him about not feeling guilty, you're not letting anybody down. We wanted to wait until today because our staff does such a great job. We've seen them produce miracles. If he was ready to play, we would play him. He just wasn't ready to play today.”
On the press:
“We have it, so if we feel we need it we will use it. Our theme for today was 'Strong Together.' Sometimes when you're playing man-to-man, it gets to be 'this is my man.' We thought that with the three-quarter court pick-up in two different ways with the 2-2-1 and the 1-2-2 after free throws we could be strong without getting hurt further up the court and hopefully be strong when we got to half court. Our guys worked. Basically, they knew they had each other's back. Today things worked really well. I think they saw that Clemson had a hard time attacking it. They got through it, but they had a hard time attacking it and then you could set up another defense. Every once in awhile you could be even more aggressive because there wasn't an attack, it was just beat it across half court. It's all on our guys. You can do whatever you want, but if they aren't playing hard and smart you can't make the thing go and they did that today.”
On the crowd:
“I've been here a long time. After a Carolina game, especially if you won, people aren't as hungry. It was great to see the place full and there was energy. You have to deal with reality. We either have eight or seven guys. I've never done that before. That's not a lot. We need all the emotional support we can get. They responded, so that was good.”
On Quinn Cook:
“I'm not saying he's Bobby Hurley as far as the type of player, but Hurley never got tired. Quinn doesn't get tired. Quinn is in unbelievable shape. He works at it, but there's something in it. He had a couple of big threes.”
On Tyus Jones:
“He's terrific. He has great poise, he's never afraid and he understands the game. He has to talk and people will listen to him. At times he'll defer. He passed up a three in the last game and guys got on him, but next time he hit it. Quinn has been superb with him. That relationship has exceeded what I could have ever thought would happen. I thought it was going to be good, it exceeded that. They are very close and together. Quinn sees stuff, and he sees it better when he doesn't have the ball.”
Duke Senior Quinn Cook
On Duke's up tempo play today:
“It was just the way we were on defense. Our defense just led to some fast break points. When myself, Tyus [Jones], Matt [Jones], Grayson [Allen], or Justise [Winslow], get the ball, we want to push it. We were smaller today and Justise got it going early. He kind of started the tempo off and we just kept feeding off what he was doing.”
“We started off the first four minutes and Coach [Mike Krzyzewski] got on us. We snapped out of it and got after it defensively, which led to great offense. Justise [Winslow] played one of his best games thus far. He kind of got us started off, and myself and Tyus were trying to pressure [Clemson's guards]. The bigs were doing a great job of talking to us, so it was a total team effort.”
On the play in the second half when Jahlil Okafor picked Cook up when he was on the floor after a three-point shot:
“He picked me up. He's strong – that's what we were joking on the bench. He's so strong. It was a good sequence. I get excited about that stuff, seeing Coach [Mike Krzyzewski] jumping and hugging Nolan [Smith], hugging Kyle Singler. That's stuff that I dreamed about happening, so while we're here in the moment, we want to take full advantage of it. I could hear [Jahlil Okafor] talking on defense the whole time. For him to be engaged the whole time, it says a lot about him, not being frustrated about him missing tonight. I know he's waiting to get back on Wednesday.”
On his conditioning and the need to play a lot of minutes:
“That's the shape you've got to be in. I think I'm in good shape. I stay here all summer, working with our strength coach. Just taking care of your body, eating, sleeping, all that goes into it. I feel great out there, and I don't get tired, myself or Tyus [Jones]. We're going to need to do that because we only have eight [scholarship] guys.”
Duke Freshman Justise Winslow
“With Jah [Okafor] out today, we went with a little smaller lineup, played a lot more zone on defense, and offensively we had a lot of mismatches that we could take advantage of. That's what we tried to do. We were small, and we tried to use our quickness and the press to our advantage, and it worked out today.”
“I try to stay aggressive every game, but especially this game with Jah [Okafor] out. Q [Quinn Cook] had to step up, I had to step up, we all had to step up. I think just me being aggressive really helped out the team – defensively and offensively. I got some deflections on the defensive end and just tried to get into the lane and make plays, whether that was finishing or kicking out to shooters.”
When asked if Duke was focused on avoiding a letdown after Wednesday night's game against North Carolina:
“Coach [Mike Krzyzewski] kind of reiterated that point, but we just try to come out here and win every game. After big games, sometimes we come out a little sluggish, but tonight we came out, we fought hard, we competed. [We were] missing Jah [Okafor], but we didn't let that get the best of us, and we came out with the W.”
When asked what his reaction was when he heard that Duke's Jahlil Okafor would not play today:
“I didn't know the status of it, but I just knew that if he was going to play or if he wasn't going to play, we were more than capable of beating Clemson tonight.”
On Duke's play without Jahlil Okafor in the lineup:
“In that Notre Dame game, when we went on that big run, for a lot of that, Marshall [Plumlee] was in for Jah [Okafor]. If we have him, if we don't, we've got more than enough weapons to get the job done. Of course we would love to have Jah. He's a special player. Everybody in the country would love to have him. We want to get him back soon, but if we can't have him, I think we can figure out ways to get wins. I think it's just every man stepping up. Tonight Q [Quinn Cook] played great. He knocked down a lot of shots. Tyus [Jones] played pretty well and Marshall [Plumlee] gave us a lot of good minutes. If Jah is out, then it's next man up.”
Duke Freshman Tyus Jones
“Without Jahlil [Okafor] in there, we were smaller so we were trying to pick up the pace. We felt that that defense that we played today, trying to get our hands in passing lanes and get deflections, can speed it up and get the tempo how we wanted it. I don't know if they were caught off guard, but we executed well. They've got some physical guys on that team, and we were able to force turnovers and not let them muscle us or get easy shots.”
Clemson Head Coach Brad Brownell
Opening Statement:
“Well first off, just give Mike [Krzyzewski] and the Duke staff and players a lot of credit. They played well tonight, obviously not having Jahlil [Okafor], they overcame it. It wasn't a problem at all. We got off to decent starts in both halves, but we just didn't play very well. The guards didn't play well. The soft press bothered us all game. We acted like we've never seen that before, and it just threw us out of rhythm a bit. I thought we played scared, to be honest with you, at various points in the game, and probably didn't compete as well as we normally do. I'm a little bit disappointed in our team today.”
On any strategy changes due to Jahlil Okafor's injury:
“No because I had 20 minutes to figure it out. Obviously, we practiced for two days on how to guard him and how we're going to guard with him. You know, it's not completely different, but it's vastly different with a smaller team and more spacing and driving angles and we knew that was going to happen, but our inability to score and our turnovers and just how passive we were offensively was what really led to our defense not being very good. We're usually better than that, but we let our poor offense, and frustration, and poor play just affect our defense. We gave up, and just didn't fight as hard as we normally do. We faced adversity in both halves. We started the game alright; we started the second half fine, but then we hit patches of adversity and some of our decision-making and ball-handling mistakes were just really poor. They got a bunch of fast-break points, and you can't beat Duke that way.”
On playing against Duke's zone:
“We thought he would play a little bit with Okafor not in the game, but we didn't handle it great, so he just stayed in the whole time. I think we went one possession man-to-man and he scored and went right back to the zone and that was it.”
On Jaron Blossomgame's ankle:
“It's sore. He didn't practice yesterday, and he did a few things in shoot around today just to know that he could go. The adrenaline from playing in Cameron is what, I'm sure, helped make him want to play. I don't think he was completely healthy at all, but he wasn't at risk of any further damage or anything like that. He wasn't quite as explosive as he normally is. He played 22 minutes, so he didn't play as much, but he wanted to play and he was fine to go out there and compete.”
On Gabe DeVoe's performance:
“He's just practiced really well the last month. I think he's more confident. He's made more shots and I thought he showed good poise. I've been trying to get him a few more minutes. He played 20 minutes today. He had one assist, one turnover, and two baskets. I thought he played pretty well, and I thought he outplayed most of the other guards on the team.”
On Duke playing with the momentum:
“The poor offense and transition defense. I thought they got a lot of long rebounds. I didn't think we got many of the 50-50 balls today. I thought they were quicker to the ball. I thought that they played with positive momentum, and once you start playing with momentum in this place as a home team, it's going to be hard to turn that around. You gotta get control of the game a bit, you gotta keep the crowd relatively quiet, and it's pretty easy to play with a double-figure lead the whole game. There's no pressure on the shots, and we weren't good enough today. I think we cut it once in the second half maybe to 10, maybe it was 12, but we need to get it to seven or eight to get them to think a little bit, but we weren't able to do it.”
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