Dec. 11, 2009
Western Kentucky 76, Vanderbilt 69
Nashville Arena, Nashville, Tenn.
Vanderbilt Head Coach Kevin Stallings
Opening Statement:
“We certainly congratulate Western Kentucky. They outplayed us and I’m not trying to take anything away from them. We’re not a very good basketball team right now. We have some time or practice coming up right here and we’ll work on it.”
On the new starting lineup:
“You have to acknowledge effort or lack thereof. Your most talented guys, if they’re not playing with the effort that is needed, tears the fabric of the team apart. It’s not a team-wide thing. We’ve got guys giving great effort, but we have key guys not giving the effort we need.”
On first half of the season:
“We’ve got to get better. We’ve had a tough stretch. Our 9 games were pretty tough. We were hoping to get through this one and couldn’t, but we’ve had a difficult stretch.”
On perimeter shooting:
“They made better plays than we did. They didn’t want it more. Going into our first game, we had one of our guys was shooting over 50% from the 3 and 2 shooting from 47%. We never thought we would have shooting statistics we have right now. Confidence is a huge thing right now and we don’t have it. I’m not disappointed with the shot selection, but we just haven’t made them.”
On coaching choices:
“If you’re going to have a good team, you need to know what to expect. I hoped we would win, but hoping isn’t good. Hoping isn’t everything. It’s up to the coaching staff to get it right. We have good kids, some played really, really hard. We’re coming off two hard losses and we were a broken mess after Illinois. We have two days to put it back together and on the third day, we played and we lost. We were a broken mess again tonight.”
On WKU’s offense:
“A.J. Slaughter concerned us tonight. He did a lot of damage tonight. We’re not defending well and that’s our responsibility. A lot of that is lack of effort and lack of know-how. It’s kind of a precarious thing when you coach basketball because games come at you quickly. We’re at the end of a 4-game stretch and you know there is going to be some slippage, but this rocks what we’re trying to establish and build.”
Vanderbilt forward Jeffery Taylor
On defense:
“It was very frustrating. We couldn’t get stops. They got a couple of offensive rebounds in a row.”
On start to the second half:
“I definitely felt like we were going to come out in the second half and throw the first punch from my dunk at the end of the first.”
On A.J. Slaughter:
“AJ (Slaughter) is a good player. He hit some great shots, but we made them miss a lot and we didn’t get the boards.”
Vanderbilt guard Jermaine Beal
On the game:
“Not starting bothered me some, but I just wanted to come out and get a win. We obviously failed at doing that.”
On teams efforts this week:
“I would agree with Coach, that we are a broken mess. Confidence is down. Hopefully we can get everything going this week during practice.”
On defense:
“Defense was not great tonight. We have to work on our defense this week.”