University of Kentucky Basketball Media Conference
Saturday, January 28 2017
Men’s Media Conference
John Calipari
Q. What do you think happened with him tonight?
JOHN CALIPARI: Well, they double-teamed (Bam Adebayo), he turned it over some, he missed some free throws, he wasn’t the same aggressive self. He could have caught and turned and shot some balls. This wasn’t that. This was, we got out-toughed and we didn’t guard the way we need to guard, which is all curable. There was a stretch where Malik doesn’t get a shot. Well, we can’t. You can’t play seven, eight minutes without him getting a shot. And it wasn’t, they were in a zone, OK, we can move them around and do some different things. There was some of that, but it was more they shot 60 percent in the second half, you’re not going to win. In a close game, again, we took, turned it over for an unforced, and then took a tough shot. No rebounds. I mean, (Josh) Jackson’s tip-in was a huge, I mean it was a one-point game. But, I’ve got to look at the tape and really break it down. (Landen) Lucas had a bunch of second-chance points. I mean, I don’t know if Bam just left him, we didn’t crack down, but there was a lot of that going on. And again, 17 turnovers. Again, 10 from our guards. We have been a low, low turnover team until the last three games. Now, all of a sudden we’re averaging 17 turnovers a game, that shouldn’t be who we are.
Q. Bill Self made a point of the last five minutes of the first half, that you guys had a working margin and then at halftime a five point game. How did you feel about that stretch going into halftime?
JOHN CALIPARI: Well, obviously, I would have rather not had that run. But if you look at it, we had like three turnovers. It’s similar to what we have done in every game. And the turnovers led to basket, not earned basket, they’re breakaways. So, I don’t know if it was three turnovers in a row, it may have been four. Had a shot in the corner that we missed. And Isaiah (Briscoe), who is usually who we go to in the zone, was on the bench. So, we were trying to figure stuff out. But again, it was — and I’m going to have to look at it on the tape, but there were I think three, maybe four turnovers in a row.
Q. Looked like the importance of this particular game here, it appeared that both teams were kind of tight. Theirs and yours both —
JOHN CALIPARI: We weren’t. I thought we started good.
Q. You shot 45 percent from the free-throw line in the first half?
JOHN CALIPARI: Who did?
Q. Kentucky did.
JOHN CALIPARI: Yeah. But I thought we started good. We had a good lead and we were playing fast and we were playing and scrambling a little bit. They had missed some open 3’s that they normally make, which is why the lead was what it was. They went zone, a little bit of triangle and two. We turned it over three, four times. And now we may have gotten tight in the second half, maybe a couple guys because the game was close. But, I liked the fact that we fought and we got it there and it came down to on a rebound or two, a turnover here, and we got to learn. We did the same thing at Tennessee. All right, we’re right where we want this, and it was turnover, turnover layup, layup. Now all of a sudden it’s four, it’s a different ball game. So, we got to look at it, cure it. The toughness in the defense, we’ll get after that and we got a couple days before Georgia. Georgia won today and played well, so we got another tough game.
Q. Did you think when Kansas went on that 10-0 run in the second half, did you feel like your kids reverted a little bit, maybe broke down, tried to do a little bit more one-on-one at that time?
JOHN CALIPARI: No. No. I think, again, the whole thing for us turnover-wise is when we make easy plays, we don’t turn it over. When we’re trying to make a harder play, like if a guy’s open in the corner, just throw it to him. Why would you ball fake him and then run a guy over. Why would you, versus an extra pass to the wing, you’re going to try to force one inside, which gets tipped away. You’re driving and they’re in, there is no drive, it’s a swing and then a drive. I mean it’s all freshman kind of stuff. So I think it was a 10-3 run to end the half. And again, when you have turnovers and they’re going for baskets, that may have been six of those points.
Q. What did you think of the way that Derek (Willis) played tonight, keeping you in it with his shooting but he missed that rebound there at the end?
JOHN CALIPARI: Missed a couple rebounds. But, I left him in because I felt we needed his shooting. And you know, you know he’s going to give a little bit up defensively and rebounding, but you’re hoping he can make enough shots to make this thing close. I thought he did a good job on the offensive end. It’s just you and a guy and either he gets it or you get it and you got to fight. And that’s something that’s got to continue to work on.
Q. Knowing how much you hate to lose, how much do you dwell on this one? And two, knowing that your team was much younger than this one, did that play a significant role in why you guys didn’t win?
JOHN CALIPARI: Well, we’re still — look, this is always a process here when you’re talking young players. I can remember in 2014, we were dying and then they got it at one point and all of a sudden we took off. This team came together a little bit faster, yet you find out all the execution stuff that I’ve been talking about will come back and haunt you. All those little things that you, if you really want to be one of those teams, and I keep saying we’re not yet, but we got great post presence, we got long players, we got some guys that can make shots, we shoot a high percentage. Normally we don’t turn it over like we do the last few games. And so it’s all doable. And as a coach, you look at this and say, OK, where do we go and what do we zero in on? And I think it’s toughness and defense. We got to be a better defensive team than we are. We had some guys that just broke down on crossover moves their layups. Post-ups where we don’t help. Down screens where we lose guys. We switch and we have a chance to switch back and we just stop playing. And they make a three at the top of the key because we didn’t switch back, which we could have. Look, I hate losing, but I think there were a lot of people that wish they had my problems. Let me say that.
Q. What did you think of the atmosphere?
JOHN CALIPARI: Oh, it was great. It was great. I thought all that was great. This is what this place is. And when we go on the road, it’s the same kind of atmosphere. Every road game is like a war. And that’s the other thing that’s tough for these kids, you got to come every game. And then when you do come, you got to finish for 40 minutes, because the other team’s not going away. You got to finish it out. You get a team down 12, 13, 14, you better get it to 20. And then you better go into half and say the first five minutes we’re going to win this game. We’re not there yet. We get it to 12, 13, and the next time I look around it’s four. Then I look up we’re down four. What the heck just happened?
Q. What was it that made them so effective against Malik after the first 12 minutes or so of the contest?
JOHN CALIPARI: They did a good job of shading toward him, whether it was the zone or they — the triangle and two, they put a man on him, and then again, like I told the staff after, we can’t go eight minutes without him shooting the ball. Seven minutes. We have an enough stuff in our offense whether it’s man or zone, for him to get shots off. I think that the shot he took on the baseline, which was a tough play at that time, was based on the fact that he hadn’t gotten a shot in a while. But we’ll work on that and, like I said, we come back to, they shot 60 percent in the first half — or second half. 60. Okay, we struggled with what we were doing, they shot 60 percent. You cannot win with a team shooting 60 percent. You can’t score enough.
Q. You mentioned some of the miscues on defense, how do you fix that really with a month to go before the games start to matter?
JOHN CALIPARI: Every day you start zeroing in on the areas that we need work. The crazy thing, you may not believe this, but we’re in this mode every year. There’s something that the team needs to work on that we’ll zero in on. I wish it was over the break where I was having two and three things a day where we could really go, but it isn’t. Everybody in the country’s in the same situation, you’re going to have a couple days in between practices. You have to give them a day off. So, you’re going to normally have two good days of practice and we just have to zero in and talk to these guys. The greatest thing about this group is they will want to win and they will want to learn. I thought we passed the ball better today, not where we were, but better. Now we got to build on that and we just got to say, look, guys, if you really want to do this, you got to be a defensive team first. Now, if you defend and rebound, what does that give us an opportunity to do? Fly. If you can’t stop a team from scoring, how are you going to play fast? You can’t play fast. So if you want to run, you got to defend first. And I thought like Dom (Dominique Hawkins), Dom fights and defends and tries and you can put him in and you know what you’re going to get from him.
Q. You haven’t lost consecutively many times at Kentucky. What do the last two losses have in common?
JOHN CALIPARI: They stink. How about that. One was on the road and one is home. We don’t normally lose here, but Kansas, you got to give them credit, they came in here and all the plays they had to make in the second half, even when we made a run to make it close again, they were effort plays, too. They were tip-ins, they were they were grabs, they were second and third shots. They were a drive to the basket and a physical tough and-one layup. That’s what they did to beat us. And I come back to, our defensive playing and our toughness. That’s what they did to us. A young team, you got to learn to fight. That’s what we’re going to have to learn to do.
UK Student-Athletes
#25, Dominque Hawkins, G
On what has been slowing the team down…
“I would say that teams are just noticing fast-break points and are running the offense instead of trying to get rebounds.”
On how it affects Kentucky that other teams are noticing how they run their offense…
“It is vital, but we have different ways we can score and that is why we have practice: finding out ways that we can score other than in transition.”
On Isaiah Briscoe’s fouls in the first half…
“Isaiah is a key player to our team. He is one of our leaders. We need him on the court to guard and defend and to do everything. He is a playmaker for us as well. So, I feel like it didn’t hurt us too much because everyone that came into the game was ready to play. ”
On being considered a consistent player at this point in the season…
“Definitely, it takes hard work. Like Coach said, when he puts me in I know what I am supposed to be doing. I know my role and I try to play it the best that I can.”
On who stepped up for Kansas in the second half…
“I feel that (Devonte’ Graham) was able to get to the basket and hit second chance points as well. I felt like, at times we weren’t communicating on defense and (were) playing lazy defense and they took advantage of that.”
#13, Isaiah Briscoe, Sophomore, G
On what he thinks happened during the second half …
“ I don’t know. They had a run in the second half and we just weren’t able to get back.”
On the toughness and defense of the team …
“We’re just not there yet. Like you said, we have a team full of freshman and sophomores. Today Kansas’ experience showed. They were down and kept fighting. I give them credit, but a lot of that is on us.”
On whether the Kansas zone defense threw Kentucky off …
“Not really. We were prepared for it. It forces us to pass the ball.”
On why Malik went several minutes without a shot …
“They obviously can’t have focus on the ball. I was trying to get him the ball, but sometimes we go to making harder plays for the team instead of making easier plays. In that stretch, or whatever, I guess we didn’t touch the ball and that’s something we’ll work at and just get better with over time.”
#35, Derek Willis, Senior, F
On UK’s defense …
“I would say pick-and-role and people sucking in. Crackdowns were a big thing. I know I missed a couple crackdowns where I was coming off the pick-and-roll and Bam (Adebayo) was with his guy. Then the crackdowns with the backside. I think it was the Lucas kid just pretty much laid the ball up and got an and-one. I don’t really remember any secret plays in the corner, so I think that was good. I just didn’t come up with some plays and I think that was the downfall of it honestly.”
On Kansas’ zone defense …
“What we were trying to do was keep it inside out. Some things just weren’t falling, and we didn’t come up with offensive rebounds. That’s just how it goes.”
On where the team is defensively …
“I just think we didn’t play winning basketball down the stretch. Up to a point I think we had them down 10 points maybe? It was looking real good, and you could feel the energy. It just felt like we wanted to break away. Then we just let them back in the game, and they started getting their confidence back thinking they could play with us. That’s just how it goes and they ended up coming up with the right plays. That’s why they won the game.”
Kansas Head Coach Bill Self
On what he was thinking when Kansas was trailing by double-digits in the first half …
“Oh, I thought this could get ugly really fast. I thought it was already ugly. I don’t think they shot the ball unbelievably well by any stretch early, but we didn’t shoot it at all and we played tight and they had all the momentum. So I don’t know what the biggest deficit was. Was it 12? The key part of the game for us was the last five minutes to get it to five at halftime. To play that poorly and go 0-for-8 (from 3-point range), I think we were like 3-of-6 from the free-throw line and got it to five. Then Josh’s two 3s to start the second half took the lid off and we were pretty good after that.”
On how much he has to do to keep his players from getting flustered …
“I think sometimes when you’re a little bit depleted, at least as you say, I think a lot of times that creates more focus. We don’t switch defenses much and we did tonight more than we have in a long time and I thought our guys were pretty focused. We made some mistakes in what we were trying to do, but I thought for the most part they executed pretty well.”
On taking satisfaction from winning in this environment …
“It’s very satisfying to win. I told our team this prepping for the game: ‘this is an important game but it’s not as important as our game on Wednesday, it’s not as important as our game last Tuesday.’ But it’s kind of like when you go to an AAU tournament. It’s kind of like the showcase game. There’s a showcase game and you win or lose, it’s no big deal. It doesn’t affect the bracket.’ That’s kind of what I thought about this game. Of course I know it means a lot to the fans of both schools, and certainly there’s a lot of tradition on the line. But I thought our experience, to answer your question – Frank and Devonte’, and Josh plays much older than his years, and Svi and Landon – I thought those guys played with pretty good poise down the stretch. Really good.”
On the success off turnovers …
“Yeah, sometimes I think stats are very misleading because points off turnovers, if I’m not mistaken, if they walk or they throw it out of bounds and then we luck into a shot at the end of the shot clock on the next possession is points off turnovers. So, I don’t think that’s fair to really say that because they did turn it over some, they had 17 and that’s probably a pretty high number for them and we had 12 which is probably about average, but that’s something that we haven’t been good at. At West Virginia it was certainly flipped on us, so that was good to see.”
On the matchup between Landon Lucas and Dwight Coleby against Bam Adebayo inside …
“Well, he’s a monster and he got off to a good start and Landon got a foul on the first or second possession and he got two (fouls) early. So, you know, that was kind of hard, but I thought Landon played very smart. He fouled out, but he wasn’t really in foul trouble because his fourth and fifth came so late. And Dwight and Mitch, although they didn’t play a ton of minutes they gave us enough of bodies to kind of lay on Bam, although I still thought Bam had a good game. It seems to me like scored more than three baskets thinking back, so we did a pretty good job. Neither team shot free throws worth a flip though. I mean, we could’ve won the game easily or they could’ve probably won the game just if either team could step up to the line and make free throws.”
Kansas Student-Athletes
#11, Josh Jackson, Freshman, G
On not making any 3-pointers in the second half and improving in second half …
“I find that, at times, when I’m in practice shooting with the guys and they’re all making 3’s that it gets kind of contagious. So I feel like that opened it up for us a little bit – it was contagious.”
On what it was like playing in this atmosphere …
“Coming into the game, we knew there was going to be a point of time where we were going to be down and trying to come back. We knew they were going to go on a run. The thing we had to do was just keep believing in each other and never stop fighting. I think we were down 12 points at one time, but we all knew that we could get back.”
On defense in the second half …
“I think switching defenses really threw them off a bit, so that helped a lot.”
On pace of the game after switching defense …
“ It felt a little slower. They’re an outstanding transition team and I think that’s the strongest part of their game. So switching up to the zone was mainly to slow them down.”
On how switching the zone affected the game …
“It definitely played into our favor with turning into a half-court game. They strive to transition – they’re fast and really athletic so going to the zone really helped us to slow them down and give us a little break on defense. We don’t really have that many guys so a lot of our guys get tired out there playing so many minutes.”
On importance of emphasizing the glass and Dwight Coleby …
“Dwight did an amazing job tonight – just being a presence all around for us. Landen (Lucas), as well. He always does a great job, but I think its just one of my jobs on the team to always try to get to the glass and help the big guys out. Even Frank (Mason) and Devonte (Graham) go a lot too. They got some key rebounds. I think Devonte grabbed about three and then had a real big one so it’s just a team thing.”
On how distractions this week affected the game and using basketball as an escape …
“I think we were able to use basketball as a distraction a little bit, but coming out here, no matter what’s happening off the court, basketball is always our main focus. I think everybody did a really good job with just staying focus today.”
#3, Frank Mason III, Senior, G
On not shooting 3’s well or rebounding well the first half …
“I think we just believed in each other, started to drive the ball down hill and stay in attack mode. We just tried to execute on the offensive end.”
On what was done different in the second half defensively …
“I think coach did a good job changing defense. We changed defense about three to four times. I think they all were pretty good, we closed out on the shooters and adjusted well.”
On how much his experience throughout the year helped him in this big of an atmosphere …
“It helped us a lot to come in here and get a win. They (Kentucky) are a great team and a great program with great tradition. Just for all the guys to come out here and experience that will help us out when it matters.”
On how going zone affected the pace of the game …
“It kind of slowed the game up, gave us (Kansas) a chance to catch our breath on the defensive end. I think it was pretty good. Hopefully we don’t have to do that moving forward. We take pride in playing man on man and guarding our man, but whatever helps us get the win were willing to do.”
On if switching there (Kentucky) bigs defensively onto guards was their (Kansas) plan of attack …
“Not really, coach tells us all the time don’t play to the mismatch, or just move the ball and it will naturally come. So that’s what we tried to do.”
On how much did you talk about not talking about other stuff and staying focused on this game …
“Not really, coach tells us to focus on the things we control and we just have to do that moving forward.”
