Colorado - ASU Quotes
Colorado Head Coach Tad Boyle
Opening Statement - “Yeah, this one stings. Obviously, we played well enough to win this game, but we didn't. We didn't [win] down the stretch, we didn’t [win] in the second half. I felt like it should have been a 20-point game minimum at halftime, but it wasn't. In this team, we continually talk about a lot of the same things: not finishing, turning the ball over, not handling pressure. It's been a common theme with this group and not being able to put two halves together, whether it's offensively or defensively, and I thought we lost this game right out of the shoot in the second half. Our guys that were starting that second half were not ready to play. They were running in mud and we did not come to play. We talked about winning the first four minutes, we talked about winning the second half. I mean, neither one of those were close. So, disappointing loss, probably top five disappointing losses in my 13 years at Colorado. I don't have them ranked, but I can't think of four that sting more than this one. I can tell you that.”On Team Pressures - “I asked our team in the locker room, why did we lose this game? Turnovers. What was the reason for our turnovers? Not being able to handle pressure. What is that a result of? Toughness. So, you just have to start with the problem. Then you’ve got to figure out, how do we fix the problem? How do we correct the problem? At the root of it all, is toughness. The question now becomes can we change that? Can I change it as the coach? Can Steve Englehart, our strength and conditioning coach change it? Can our players change it? The rest of this season will be determined by that answer.”
On Past Losses and the Future - “Kind of what I said, enough is enough. Look, we've had four losses now, right? We’re 4-4. Win, loss, win, loss, win, loss, win, loss. So, the answer to that right now is absolutely not. Our guys can't learn from it. They cannot. I mean, we just have to play better. We played well enough to win tonight. We got stops down the stretch when we needed to, but you know, on that last play, Horne was driving to the rim, we had four guys collapsing on him and we left a wide open, good shooter on the scouting report. Again, it gets back to the scouting report. Look, we beat Yale the other night because we got the stop when we needed to get the stop, and we made free throws. We had to make free throws tonight. We didn't make free throws. We had to make free throws and we didn't get that last stop. I’ve been doing this a long time. It should not be so different in terms of the gut feeling that I have, or that our players have based on winning. Winning and losing is important. It is. If it wasn’t, the difference between the feeling of how I felt after beating Yale, which maybe we deserved it, maybe we didn't, but we dodged a bullet, versus tonight, where we didn't dodge a bullet in the Arizona State game. It’s the same team. It's the same inconsistencies. It's the same problems. You'd like to learn from your wins and our team can't do that. We can’t. From what we've shown, we've learned from our losses up to now, but guess what, Washington on Sunday. They're playing well. Arizona State was out there without their starting point guard tonight and with another guy who's probably the most talented guy in their program, who's out with a suspension. So two of their top players are out. They come in this building, in this environment, we let them do that. We wilted tonight. We wilted to their pressure. As a coach, that's really really hard to deal with. I’ve got to do a better job. I have to do a better job.”
On Pressure and Struggles Offensively - “Look, we couldn't handle our pressure. We couldn't make an entry pass. We couldn't make a backdoor cut. We couldn't drive the ball, and make a play off the bounce. So when you can't execute your stuff, you can't make an entry pass for your sets. It’s hard to run sets. We turned over probably three or four of those tonight alone. If you can't handle a guy up in your grill, and get by him, and make a play for either yourself or your teammate, it's tough to handle that pressure. You’ve got to be able to handle the pressure, and we're not able to handle the pressure. That's the bottom line. Our offensive execution down the stretch, I mean, I got coaches saying ‘run this, run this, run this’, okay, well, it didn't matter what you ran. If you can't pass, and catch the ball, you can't handle pressure. It doesn't matter what you run. You can't set a screen to get a guy open in an entry? It doesn’t matter what you run. The problem is not our X's and O's, it's our belief. Our toughness of saying okay, I'm going to make a play. You have to make plays down the stretch. It doesn't mean Cambridge made plays down the stretch, he did. His brother hit a big three in the corner down the stretch. Sometimes, it comes down to guys that don't win can't make plays. We had our chances. We’re up two with the ball and a press, and we get the ball in the press. They take our lunch money. We got to stop. Couldn't get a rebound. We can't make free throws. So, it's a combination of things. It's not just one thing. But if you had to boil it down to one thing, it’s toughness.”
On Final Minutes of Game - “Look, we have to be able to rely on our defense to get stops, which we did tonight. You’ve got to be strong with the ball, knowing okay, if the score’s tied when they've got the ball, you’ve got to get a stop, and you’ve got to get a score to win, right? Or a stop and get fouled. If you're down two, you’ve got to get a stop and a score. If you're up two, you’ve got to get a stop and be strong with the ball because you know they're coming to foul you. So, every situation might be different. The Yale situations down the end of the game were different than tonight’s situations. Again, it comes down to, can you get that stop? Can you execute your offense and be strong with it knowing that they're going to come foul you? Can you step up and make free throws? Can you take care of the ball knowing that they're going to shoot passing lanes? So, it's a possession game. It's really not rocket science in terms of what you tell your guys. You have to believe. We had guys tonight who are rattled. They're shot and their confidence is shaken. I have to look at that and say am I yelling too much? Can they not handle a coach that gets in them and challenges them? Because right now, they can’t.”
On Fixing Complacency - “You have to have a sense of urgency in every possession. I'll look at the first half. They had 23 points at halftime. We fouled a three-point shooter, he made three pointers. We box a guy out and try to go get a one handed rebound and again, I don't know who can get one-handed rebounds. Dr. J, he couldn't get one-handed rebounds. It goes off our hand, in the basket. That's five points. Transition defense, you know, they're throwing it up to the rim for lobs, we stop and just watch it go over our head and we don't even make a play on the ball. There's another seven points. That's where the consistency comes. That's the first half. Oh, were you good enough in the first half? Yeah, we were but we weren't consistently good enough. You get a team like Arizona State down, you better step on their throats. We talked about it at halftime. We're up by 15, we're going to win the first four minutes. We're going to win the half. It starts with the first four minutes. Did we win the first four minutes? No. Did we win the second half? No. We got our tails kicked. So, it's a sense of urgency that every possession matters. That's what we have to do and that's what we don't do. We think we're up. People are going to fold because what good teams do is don't fold.”
On How ASU Won
“ASU ramped it up. They were down some guys. They were tired in the first half. We didn't have the pace of the game going in the second half because you couldn't start to get the pace going when you know you're not sprinting the floor. Your guys are running in mud, and we had to stop early in the second half. KJ is walking the ball up, and Lawson, there's no sense of urgency. We're trying to get the pace going when you're at home in altitude. We couldn’t. We did a good job of that in the first half but not the second half. It gets back to consistencies. Look, you’ve got to start somewhere. We’ve got to start with our toughness, mental toughness, physical toughness. It's all one of the same. It's all toughness but it's as much mental as it is physical.”
On Point Guard Play - “Our guard play tonight was not good enough. When your offense struggles it starts with your guard play. It doesn't end with your guard play but it starts with it. The combination of KJ and Julian, we had nine turnovers. That's our point guard position. It's going to be hard to win when you have nine turnovers from your point guard position. If you're not making shots, if you're not making free throws, and you're not tough on offense, it's going to be tough to win. With that said, we could have won this game, but we didn’t.”
Colorado Players
Gr., G Jalen Gabbidon
On the problems with free throws - “I think it's a repetition, rhythm, and concentration thing. Free throws are free. There's progress to be made being a very good free throw shooting team. We got them up a lot in practice, and we just got to step up and make free throws.”
On how to change the team’s mentality - “I don't think there's anything you could point to. I think it's the mentality and toughness coach talks about. You have to play the same way from start to finish. You can't stop and take breaks. It's a matter of us as a team just doing it. You can't talk about it anymore. You can analyze it, you can rationalize why it happens. Every second half we throw up a dud and we can't let that happen. We have to come out with the same fire that we come out of the game with and that's that.”
On the upcoming Washington trip - “It’s a weird thing to describe how to do these things. Game's over. We have probably the rest of the four or five hours until we go to sleep to think about and then we wake up and we have scouting report in the morning for our next game. If you sit on this game, it's only going to carry over to the next game and so we have to take the lessons we've learned, watch film, and move on because we have another challenge up in Washington. I know that I've never played there, but I know it's a hard place to play and we have to be ready for that challenge. It's funny how sports are like that, you have another one in three days. You have to forget it.”
On going 9-for-21 on layups - “You say 9-for-21 but the shot selection is a huge part of that. There were a lot of layups that got blocked, a lot of layups that had no chance to get to the basket. If you take those out, instead of 9-for-21, we’re probably 9-for-15. It’s about learning how to make the right play, understanding they're coming to rotate hard and then you have to make the extra pass or come to two feet and play off two feet and get to a better shot. If you factor that in, we should be great from two. We have to learn how to get the shots we want every possession and not just if we're 9-for-21. We need to be better at finishing. Maybe we should be smarter about what the heck we're taking to begin with.”
So., G KJ Simpson
On how ASU disrupted the offense - “They're an aggressive team, they just picked up their intensity. But, I just kind of put it on myself a little bit because my job as a point guard, especially a leader, I got to control everything, I have to make sure the game doesn't get out of hand. I myself turned the ball over too much. Our offense was too wild. We just had to do a better job of playing our game. And I think we just got caught up in trying to play too fast because they were pressuring us.”
On turnovers - “It goes on what I said, we weren't really playing our game. We were getting sped up and we were making uncharacteristic passes when we could have swung the ball and made simple passes. When you let a team like that get going and they finally have confidence, things get hectic so we kind of did it to ourselves.”
On the second half - “The way we started the second half off, the starting five, including me, we didn't come out ready to play like they did. They played like they had nothing to lose because they're down and we got complacent like we always do and they went on a run. Their shooters got hot. When a team like that gets going, it's hard to take the life away from them. The thing that helped in the first half is we didn't give them shots. They were taking some shots and they were missing. We were getting on and going. We were tiring them out. In the second half they were making everything because of our mistakes. So it was on the five unit and the starting five unit.”
On the upcoming Washington trip - “Obviously, myself especially, I'm going to think about these things a lot for sure because we had this one and we let it go. But this is one of those things where as hard as it is, you just have a mindset of just move on to the next one because with season, games are back-to-back and only days apart. You can't just dwell off the loss.”
On watching film – “Every film session we ask how can we get better? What is it that we did wrong? What is it that led to us coming out in the second half and losing the lead? What was it that we could’ve done to win the game late down the stretch? Just focusing on certain things and making sure that we get better before this next game.”
Apologizing to Buff Nation - “I just want to say, it's my fault Buff Nation. We're going to get better. We're going to get better. We're going to work hard. We're going to watch film and we're going to get better. But we had this one. Personally, I blame it on myself as a leader, but we're going to get better. I'm going to make sure that we get better, and I get better.”
Arizona State Head Coach Bobby Hurley
On second half message - “I thought they were a little more active than we were, a little quicker than we were, and a little more aggressive and impose their will on the game. We just knew we had to amp up our pressure and I think that was the difference. We were very active on defense. Desmond [Cambridge Jr.] got us started in the second half, he hit a couple shots and then we started gaining some confidence. We talked about just chipping away at it under each four-minute segment, just trying to close the gap a little more and a little more and stay in the fight.”
On what went wrong in the first half - “It's what we've hung our hat on defensively. We weren't ourselves in the first half and they had too many open looks. They got some back cuts and they also were quicker to the ball and on 50/50 balls. We talked about all those things in a very positive way. We didn't panic. I think we're not front runners. We have confidence that it's a 40-minute game and we just stayed the course.”
On the last possession - “Sometimes you think about calling a timeout in that situation, but it appeared that we had an advantage and when the pass ahead to DJ [Horne], it shows the evolution of a guy like that because he could score yet he drove at baseline and found his teammate and the rest is history. Big time shot to Desmond [Cambridge Jr.] so glad we could do this without Frankie [Collins]. He wanted to be with us. Obviously couldn't because of illness, we're just excited about the potential to group.”
On Gr., G Desmond Cambridge Jr.- “He's a very underrated guy, the storyline will be, Desmond [Cambridge Jr.] hitting the big shot and then he made a bunch of big ones in the second half. But I think Desmond [Cambridge Jr.] was very consistent throughout that game and just brings a lot of intangibles and toughness to our team.”
On the message for Sunday’s game vs. Stanford - “We talked about trying to set the tone and get off to a good start in league play. We had a couple of signature wins in nonconference already. Very few people could win on this court with this crowd and altitude and the team that Coach Boyle has is going to win a lot of games. We feel very grateful that we won this game and we'll get back and get the guys grounded and prepare for Sunday.”