courtesy of Jack Alden

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"We had a couple of things that should make you grin. Jeff Boschee can't make a basket to save his life when he's wide open, yet he dribbles in there, a guy fouls him, the ball squirts up in the air and goes in. Then I really chewed 'em at one point in the first half because the shot clock is running down, and Jeff Carey's the only guy on the court who knows the shot clock is winding down, and I've got two guards out there who are supposed to be halfway intelligent, so I screamed at 'em. Then in the second half the shot clock's winding down, and Nick Collison knew it was and shot a three, and it went in. "Defensively, I thought we were really active. I told 'em there would be three or four plays that we would cut out and put on the hustle film for at least the next ten years. At least three or four times we had two, three, and four guys on the floor (going for loose balls). In the second half we did a better job of getting out to their three-point shooters. The first half, we're in good shape, then all of a sudden they make four threes in a row. Two of 'em are because we didn't sprint back and we had to pick up for big guys, and then little guys got open. Two other times we just didn't build out and play the guy. "I told 'em today we were going to have at least two or three guys who are going to have to play 35 or 36 minutes. We're about as thin as I've ever had a team; since my first year, for sure. Mario was sick this week, and would have been able to go today, but I have this thing in my head that says if you can't practice the day before, it's going to be very difficult for you to play in a game. Luke wanted to try, but this morning during a shoot around we were in our dummy offense and he was limping around. I was gonna put him in with sixteen seconds left in the first half, because we were gonna run a set play, try to get him open from three and see if he could make one there. I didn't get him in there, so I decided to hold him out completely. Hopefully, we'll have those two plus Kenny next week. We need to get our full team back out there. "Everybody's mad at (Brett Ballard) in that locker room right now because every day in practice he makes every shot he takes. Against the blue team, he just drills them every single day, and he didn't make any tonight. But he really did a good job defensively for us. Jeff Boschee got two fouls on him early in the game, and I didn't want a situation where anybody has three, so he sat out a good portion of the first half, and Brett and Lewis both got in there and did some nice things for us. "Eric was really good. Twenty-four (points) and fourteen (rebounds) are big time numbers. I yelled at him because he took that jump shot on the baseline. We can't be dumb. If you're 7-1 and the guy guarding you is 6-8 and has three fouls, you can't be taking jump shots. But you take that play out, and I thought he was really active on the offensive boards, he took the ball to the basket. Nick Collison was really something. Drew had 21 points and eight rebounds, and he didn't have a very good game, because if you shoot it 19 times, you *ought* to have 21 points. He missed some easy ones, but he was playing a position he hadn't played until we played DePaul. We drew up a set play on an out-of-bounds one time, got him going back door and everything's perfect, made me feel real good as a coach, and then he misses the blessed layup. Our big guys really were something, but we should have been. I challenged 'em before the game that this team was very similar to Wake Forest, and we had a huge size advantage, and we didn't take advantage of it. Tonight we took advantage of it. "We out-rebound them 43-30, and they got some more rebounds in the second half than they should have gotten. When you have the size advantage that we had, with the talent, you ought to go inside. Our goals was to try to get them in foul trouble and get the ball inside, and I think that worked pretty well."

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