Jan. 21, 2006
– GEORGIA TECH HEAD COACH Paul Hewitt
“If you look at the stat sheet and see 27 turnovers, I don’t think there’s anything else I can point to. We didn’t take care of the basketball. Give credit to Clemson, their zone gave us problems and our execution wasn’t very crisp. We haven’t seen a lot of zone, but we did work on it this week. They’re long and they really got out in the passing lanes, and we didn’t react to it very well. One of the things we talked about was using pass fakes, but we didn’t do that. Every pass became an adventure. Credit to them for changing up the defense to see if we could adjust to it.
“I think we got content to trade baskets with them, especially from about the 10-minute mark of the first half to the 10-minute of the second half. If you’re going to do that, you’d better be making all of your shots, not turning the ball over. I’m reading minds here, but we looked like a team that wanted going rest on defense and work hard on offense, instead of the other way around. You’re not going to win any games like that.
“They’re were times in the first half when we would force turnovers and then just give it right back to them because we couldn’t take care of the basketball.
CLEMSON HEAD COACH OLIVER PURNELL
“I thought there were a couple of keys to today’s win. First of all, our players approach and attitude. It would have been very easy to let some of the frustration that we had the other night against Miami carry over and we talked about not allowing that to happen in our preparation, and particularly in the game, I thought our guys fought from the beginning until the end. I thought that our ability to turn around the rebounding story in the second half contributed to our number of stops down the stretch. The bottom line is that down the stretch, we defended. I am sure the basket got smaller for Tech versus the zone, but we weren’t giving them a lot of second and third looks and I think that pretty much told the story.”
“Real happy to get a road win in this league at any time, particularly when you have a stretch of road games like we do, you want to break those up and stay out of losing streaks in this league and if you do that, particularly when you win on the road, you have a chance to be successful.”
“Well the reason we went to the zone was that we had trouble guarding their double low post action with Smith and Dickey. We were stuck with one of our young freshman and if we went small on either one of those guys, they were going right at him. So, we went to some zone and were successful and the reason we stayed with it was that it was successful.”
“We decided to not be frustrated and we knew that Georgia Tech was going to make some runs. There are good athletes in this league and good teams and we’re going to have offensive droughts. To keep things in perspective, we are a team that has to fight for 15 rounds and we can’t deter from that and our guys clearly got that message today.”
GEORGIA TECH PLAYERS
On returning to action — “I was patiently waiting, doing a lot of rehab and treatment and trying to give my teammates support from the bench as much as possible, even though I wasn’t playing. [Paul Hewitt] He told to be patient, I wanted to get back out there and help the team and do as much as I possibly could, but it was best for me to be patient, rehab and get my toe back to almost 100 percent.”
“It was great to get back out there on the court. I was kind of rusty, which I didn’t expect because I did practice a couple days before the game, but when you get out there and your adrenaline gets going, it caused me to have a couple of turnovers I wish I could take back.”
On the game’s turnovers — “We had some unforced turnovers tonight, which is uncharacteristic of us. We’re usually the ones initiating the defense and creating turnovers. We need to get back and practice and step it up for Wednesday against Maryland.”
On not protecting home court — “It is pretty frustrating. We came into the game without a lot of intensity. We had some turnovers in the second half because of our lack of intensity. I really don’t feel like I had the intensity that I need to have and as the leader of this team and I think they kind of followed that, so that’s a game I have to put on myself.”
On the game’s turnovers — “Clemson is No. 5 in the nation in steals, or something like that, and they’re small, quick and get into the passing lanes. I don’t think it was all us, we’re not used to playing their style of basketball. They jumped out into the passing lanes and we’re used to teams sitting back. They did what they do best, getting into the passing lanes, pick up steals and get easy baskets.”
On getting down to teams in the ACC — “Yes you can, and we experienced that at Wake Forest last Wednesday night. We were down I think at most 27 points, we came back to within eight, but still lost by 15. It’s hard to get down in the ACC and come back and win.”
On the offense — “We had some difficulty with their zone, but we got some shots and they weren’t going down for us. We got off good shots, they just wouldn’t go down.”
On the turnovers — “I don’t really know what it was. They play great defense, they get out into the passing lanes all the time, and we knew that but couldn’t overcome it. Sometimes we didn’t cut hard enough, we were being lazy at times, but that’s no excuse because we knew what we were going up against. The scouting report said that they get into the passing lanes, we should have adjusted, but I can’t take anything away from them, they played great defense today.”
