Jan. 26, 2016
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Vanderbilt Head Coach Kevin Stallings
Opening statement:
“Very, very, very hard fought basketball game. I think [Florida Coach Mike White] is doing a great job with that team, and we feel fortunate to get a win. I liked how we played defensively until the very end. We got a little tentative, we had a lead, they were charging hard, and that’s kind of to be expected. I thought our shot selection got really poor there for a stretch. We had a seven or eight point lead, but it looked like we were playing from ten down. I was kind of disappointed in that. We were a little unsettled, I thought, but we made some big free throws down the stretch, Luke made two, Wade made two huge ones at the end, and Damian made some big ones. When your two best players play well, then you usually have a chance to win, and our two best players played well tonight, so that gave us a chance. I thought Luke’s presence at the goal was significant, again. I thought, again, up until the end, we did a great job taking away the three-point line. They’ve been shooting it like crazy from outside the three point line, and I thought we did a nice job there until the very end. We need to take better care of the ball, that was disappointing, but I’m really proud of our team, proud of how we hung in there. Really happy for my guys.”
On Damian Jones playing through contact:
“I thought Damian played well through contact. It was a physical game. They have a good, physical team. They play hard, they’re tough. You have to play through contact in a game like this, and I thought Damian did an exceptional job of that tonight. I thought he rebounded the ball well. I liked Dame’s look, he made some mistakes of course, but I liked his look tonight.”
On if he can see Damian’s big games coming:
“Not always, no. I don’t have a crystal ball. If I did I would avoid some of the things that would go wrong. There are some things that we can work on, but Wade and Damian carried the night for us.”
On the team’s highest RPI win of the season:
“We need quality wins, I don’t think there’s any question about that. We’re not trying to hide from that. We got one tonight, and we’re happy about it, and we had to fight for it. We had to make some plays at the end of the game to do it. It’s like I told our team in a timeout, this is good for us. We need this. We need a close game that we have to fight it out and win, and we got it and we did. That, hopefully will help us when we encounter the next one.”
On Florida’s tight defense:
“It’s interesting, because they play defense different ways. This is the first time I’ve seen their man pressure like this, they’ve been more packed in [in the past]. They press back to a packed-in man most of the time. They wanted to get after us, obviously, and they did. I think that’s the reason Damian had a good night. We tell our guys, if the defense is strong outside, it needs to be weak inside. If they’re going to press up on our perimeter guys, then we’ve got to throw it inside and Dame’s got to go to work in there and he did tonight. We were far from our best. You look down at the stat sheet and you see some guys who didn’t have particularly good nights for them, but we need to be able to grind out a win, we need to be able to grind out a tough, hard-fought, ugly, nasty win. We can win when it’s pretty, sometimes, make a bunch of shots, we look all fun and fuzzy, but we need to be able to win the nasty ones, and we won a nasty one tonight.”
On if this win can be a confidence boost:
“I hope so. Confidence is an interesting thing. I hate to steal from another coach in our league, but I saw where one of the other coaches in our league said about confidence, and I think he’s 100 percent right, `It’s not what I say to them, it’s what they say to themselves. It’s the conversation that they’re having in their own head with themselves that determines whether there’s the kind of confidence they need or not.’ I think that’s really true. We obviously have some guys who need a little more confidence. I can sit there and tell them that I think they’re good players all day long, but they need to tell themselves that.”
On how the pressure from Florida helped the team:
“It does wonders for our team because, when people press up on us and we still can’t do anything inside, we’re pretty much up a creek without a paddle. What happened tonight were the two things that have to happen if people press up on us in the half court. Wade’s got to go by some people and get to the foul line and get to the rim, which he did exceptionally well, and we’ve got to be able to throw the ball to Damian and get some buckets. Between those two they shot 25 free throws, and that’s what we have to do to you when you press up on us. Hopefully we can continue to do that.”
On holding Dorian Finney-Smith to just one three-pointer:
“I’m going to say that that was more of him having an off night. He’s been making them at an alarming rate, almost. He had some wide-open ones that I didn’t make where I’m just sitting there thinking that’s in. I think some of that just had to be a bad shooting night for him, was all it was.”
On winning a tough, close game:
“None of it works unless somebody else can do it. When you get into dog fight games like this, [Florida] guards hard and they guard the mess out of you, your guys need to come through. They’ve got to play for you and if they don’t come through, then somebody else has to come through. Tonight, those two guys came through for us, and they needed to because only three other guys scored six, four, and six [points]. Sounds like we’re dialing a telephone number. We had more turnovers than points from our bench, I guess because we didn’t have any points from our bench. It’s just one of those things. It’s not going to go all smoothly against a team that’s that well coached and plays that hard. You have to get in the trenches in front of you, and that’s why this game was good for us. We needed to go win a fight instead of a game. I don’t mean that in a literal sense, but that was just a knock down, let’s go at it, they guard the heck of us and we guard the heck out of them [game]. We feel good about scoring one more point than they did.”
Reflecting on Kentucky after tonight’s win:
“It’s inexcusable to perform the way I did against Kentucky. It didn’t help the team at all…I definitely wanted to come out here against Florida, a very good team, and try to bounce back. I owed it to my team and coaching staff.”
On Florida’s perimeter:
“They’re very tough. Casey Hill, Chiozza, they really gave it to you pressuring the ball. What allowed me to get to the basket was we have such great shooters on our team and the big didn’t want to step off from Damian, so anytime I got two feet in the paint I was able to finish because they played real tight.”
On the mindset for tonight’s game:
“Just get a win and bounce back from a very embarrassing loss on an ESPN game against a team we’re supposed to be at least in competition with–that caliber team. To get beat by 19 points by Kentucky is just inexcusable for the expectations we have for ourselves. Again, it was a great Florida team coming in here and like Damian said, a great RPI team, you’ve gotta have that intensity and we lacked that at Rupp.”
On the win:
“I wouldn’t say it was our best win. It was a good win against a good team, but I don’t know if I want to say it was our best win. It was a tough, grinding fight. The coaches talked about winning the fight before the game and I think the first half we definitely won the fight but the second half they came and outscored us 40 to 30…that’s something our coaches preached to us and something they’re a bit disappointed in, but we did what we needed to win.”
On the win against a tough team:
“It’s really good. They’re a top-RPI team and I think it’ll look good on our resume and looking forward, build some confidence for the games later in the season.”
On playing well on contact:
“Every time I go down to the post I just think about just putting the ball in the basket, posing hard, getting in deep position makes it easier to get an easy bucket.”
Florida Head Coach Mike White
Head coach Mike White on his second tough year playing in Memorial Gym:
“It’s tough, this is a building I’m not sure I’ve had any success in. I don’t like Memorial Gym very much. It’s a historic place that Vandy’s had a lot of success in. Any time you’re going to compete against Kevin Stalings and one of his teams, you’re going to get a great effort and compete against a very good team.We dug ourselves a hole early, we had a couple miscues and a couple switches in the first half that led to six points for [Vandy]. But I thought they were quick on the ball in the first half and that they played really hard and that for forty minutes defensively they were really good. One of the best two or three defensive teams that we’ve played this year. I was really impressed with Luke Kornet. I thought that he was fantastic and really staying in front of the ball. He’d alter shots and block shots. He was terrific.”
White on Vanderbilt’s defense:
“We were just searching. You’re playing against a really good defense and not getting great looks, and they’re running you off the line. It’s a combination of altering shots at the rim and defending the three point line, so those guys funnel you into their bigs. Their perimeter guys are good at making you bounce it and drive it. The biggest concern for this game for me was how we were going to score. What they [Vandy] make you do is something that we’re not great at. We’re not a team that’s had a lot of success just driving it to the rim and making one on one plays. We’re a team that’s been better at transition, and these guys defend those areas in which we’ve had success in recently. A lot of it has to do with Vandy being really good defensively.”
White on Florida taking significantly more shots than Vandy:
“It’s crazy. Yeah, we had 26 more shots. It was an odd game, an ugly game, two teams that I thought played really hard. Both teams assist to turnover ratio wasn’t very good. Again, I thought two teams really battled defensively. Down the stretch in the second half, a free throw line block outs killed us. We’ve got to do a better job at that, but it’s much easier said than done to block out Damien Jones. With that length it seemed like he got his hands on so many basketballs. Again, the switches in the first half, ball screen coverage in the first stretch, we allowed Wade Baldwin to get too deep too often and you can’t allow him to get that much space. He’s too good of a player.”
White on losing Justin Leon early in the game:
“I don’t want to make any excuses. I don’t know that we would’ve won the game with Justin. I thought that Vanderbilt was a better basketball team than us tonight. But it certainly hurts us with him not being out on the floor. We hope he gets back quickly because he’s had a great month for us. He’s our toughest kid. To win on the road in the SEC with loose balls and some of those missed block outs, Justin’s strength gives us a toughness and we hope he’s back here real soon. Vandy was toughest than us, period, tonight whether Justin played or not.”
White on Leon’s injury:
“I don’t want to assume anything. He got hit in the head and didn’t feel very well. We’ll find out more tomorrow.”
White on what will carry over from the game:
“We’ll watch a ton of film. Our guys are probably sick of watching film at this point in the season. As I continue to tell them, I’m more stubborn than they are. We’re going to watch every free throw line, missed block outs, ball screen coverage, and the couple switches that we messed. Offensively, I’m okay with missing shots. I’m more okay with that than some of the other things that we’re talking about. You’re going to miss shots against a really good defense. Some of the decisions in terms of the turnovers offensively we’ll watch as well. We’ve got to move on in a hurry because we’ve got another really tough opponent with West Virginia coming in Saturday.”
White on why Vanderbilt is tough to beat:
“I think it’s really simple. Kevin is obviously really smart. They run you off of the line. Their guards and their wings sprint at you and make you bounce it and make you drive it. You’re driving it into Luke Kornet and Damien Jones- seven footers with length, athleticism, ability to move their feet, intelligence, timing- those guys don’t just try to block every shot. They altered as many as they blocked. They take up so much space, it’s almost like there’s six defenders out there. I though three or four times I was screaming at my guys, “shoot the ball.” In the games in the past month, they were probably pretty good decisions to shot fake it and drive it and give it to someone else. But when you’re playing Vanderbilt, you have got as good as a look as you’re going to get. I wish two or three of those times they had just shot it because when you drive it, you’re driving it into seven footers with length then you pitch it to a guy who might not even be as good of a shooter as you. Now they’re running him off the line and running him to the bigs. They’re just really good defensively. You don’t have a lot of time or a lot of space, and then they do a really good job of playing physically without fouling.”
White on how his defense played:
“It was okay. On nights like this our defense has got to be really, really good. It has got to carry us. Those eight or ten miscues, I keep going back to all those extra possessions they got and free throw line block outs. You can’t come in and miss seven of those and expect to beat Vandy on the road- it’s just not going to happen.”