Dec. 4, 2005
– Georgia Tech head coach Paul Hewitt
“It’s good to be 1-0 in the ACC. I thought we played exceptionally well in the first half. In the second half, I thought they had a lot more energy than we did. [Jason] Cain really set the tone for them. Coming into the game, we talked him being their best offensive rebounder. He got five offensive rebounds for them in the first half and kind of solved the riddle for them. They really got after us on the class.
[Defense on Singletary] “We tried to put bigger defenders on him. We didn’t put Zam Fredrick on him, we put Mario West, D’Andre Bell, Lewis Clinch on him, guys that we thought were a little bit bigger. And then basically told everybody else that they had to see him at all times. I’m not going to take any credit away from their effort on the offensive glass, but we were so conscious of helping on him, and when you help, you give up offensive rebounding lanes. I don’t want to take any credit away from their effort, but we just felt like we had to see him (Singletary) at all times.
“I felt like we were playing very hard in the first half. The first two or three minutes of the second half, I didn’t feel good, and we subbed quickly to try to get our energy level back up. But it’s a win. It’s a league win, and we’re very happy to be 1-0 in the league.
“We have the capability of being a much better shooting team. That’s going to come. We were a little bit disjointed tonight. I thought the effort was pretty good for the most part, but we’ve got to keep building on what we’re trying to do. Going into the second half, we had played three pretty good halves of basketball, and that’s how I’m trying to judge this team. Then in the second half tonight, we’re capable of playing better. I thought in the first half we showed a nice carry-over from Wednesday night, but I can’t quite explain what happened in the second half. Their energy level and effort was better than ours in the second half and they just absolutely dominated us on the boards.
[Smith’s effectiveness inside] “He’s a strong kid, and when he’s healthy and in pretty good shape, he’s quick off his feet. He’s lost about eight or 10 pounds, and I think that explains why his play has picked up in the last two ballgames.
Georgia Tech forward Jeremis Smith
On the way he played tonight — “I was happy with everything, except the way I rebounded on the offensive end. I think I could’ve rebounded better. I only came down with nine rebounds, and I don’t think any of those rebounds really helped my team. I could’ve done a lot better rebounding the ball on both ends.”
On second half play — “The second half was very sloppy. I don’t think the effort wasn’t there, I think Virginia picked it up in the second half, they really wanted to win and came to play in the second half. Their coach probably got on them at halftime and they came out ready to play and we didn’t.”
On ACC play getting under way — “Duke and Virginia Tech were playing and us tonight. It’s due or die every night in the ACC, there’s zero nights off.”
Georgia Tech center Ra’Sean Dickey
On his confidence in his offensive play — “It’s always been here. The coaches of the team have been telling me since the beginning of the season that a lot of the offense is going to be run through me. So the confidence has been there, it’s just been a matter of me going with the flow and not trying to force things.”
On fighting through adversity — “There are some things that happen during the game that goes against you and we try not to let that bother us. I try and keep the intensity up on the offensive and defensive ends when things are going the other team’s way. We just fought today and everything turned out fine.”
On other team’s paying attention to Georgia Tech — “They have to now. People were saying that you’d be a fool if you watched the second half of the game [Michigan State], we played like a team, a family and that probably woke a lot of teams up that we have to play this year.”
Georgia Tech guard Zam Fredrick
On stopping UVa’s guard at bay on the offensive end — “We had a strategy tonight to stop their guards from scoring and getting penetration and it worked out well. We tried to put pressure on them early, take the ball out of certain people’s hands and make other people bring it up. Give people help on the drives and make other people take shots, even though he [Sean Singletary] took a lot of shots, he wasn’t making them because we had a lot of pressure on him.”
On building on a double digit lead and not letting the team back in — “When we get up, sometimes we don’t go for the kill. That involves not just offense, but we still have to play good defense. Get the rebound. We play good defense on the first shot and then we tend to think the possession is over with and we can’t do that. We have to get the rebound and that’s what we’re having trouble with right now. The first half we did a great job, but we got up 15 points, relaxed, played good defense for the first shot and they would get the offensive rebound and start cutting into the lead.”
Virginia head coach Dave Leitao
“I thought that Georgia Tech did a much better job than we did in sustaining their effort, especially coming off two losses and coming back home, and at both controlling at the defensive end of the floor and getting better high percentage shots than we did. When you do that, and you don’t give yourself an opportunity to at least keep the game close because you give up too many easy things on both ends, obviously you pay a price for it.”
“There’s definitions for what good shots are or are not, and we took many, many more than our share of what I wouldn’t consider good shots.”
“When you’re not scoring, [a] 13 [point lead] can seem like 33. We were shooting early in the shot clock. We weren’t taking balanced shots. We weren’t taking shots that we have been trying to get guys to take with the kind of energy that we need to take them with. For a lot of the game, we continued to take shots that we really didn’t have any business taking and didn’t have that good of an opportunity to go in.”
[on T.J. Bannister] — “I probably shouldn’t even have played him. I don’t know that he is quite ready. He has only been in practice for two or three days, and the rate and speed that a conference game is played at, I don’t know that he is quite ready. I was just looking for other options. But there is no way that he can play well. He can play, but he can’t play well because there are so many things that he has to catch up on.”
“I don’t think that you take very much away from losses. If Jason Cain plays well, then that means that I have to expect win, lose or draw that he is going to play like that every night. You don’t do that for anybody. You can’t pick and choose who you throw bouquets to after losses. It’s a team loss, we didn’t do a very good job. We have to go back to the gym and correct it.”
[on 28 offensive rebounds, and 52 total rebounds] — “If I can guarantee that you will have that every game, then yes. If you have eight and you win, then I’ll take that versus 28 and lose. Defensive rebounding is something that we have tried to get guys to commit to doing, and we have to continue to move in that direction. But at the same point and time, the game is played from a lot of different fronts. You have to not turn it over, and we turned it over at an alarming rate. You have to take high percentage shots, especially when you don’t have a large margin of error. When you don’t do that, it really doesn’t matter.”
“We didn’t play well, and as a result we didn’t win.”
[on the second half comeback] — “I told the guys to just keep getting stops and we’ll worry about the rest later. We started chipping away and we kept attacking the basket, which is what I told them that we needed to do. By attacking the basket, we got high percentage shots and we got the lead down to four.”
