Jan. 13, 2018
Recap | Final Stats | Notes | USATSI Gallery
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GEORGIA TECH HEAD COACH Josh Pastner
Opening Statement:
“First off it’s a good win for us. I thought we played well from the start of the first half and the start of the second half. Pitt made a good run in the first half with changing some of the defenses. Pitt is a good team, I know that they are young, but they are going to be good. Pitt is a hard team to play against because they are coached very well, run a good offense, they are sound and discipline, but we are fortunate that we started the game very well and got a nice lead. I knew going in that it would be a hard game. The amount of actions that they run, and all of the good things that they run, it is a hard team to play against. I am proud of Abdoulaye Gueye with the way he played, other than his technical foul, he played a nice game. I thought overall that it was a good team effort.
On Georgia Tech starting out with a 21-1 lead:
“We have finally have gotten to start to practice and get our team together so we have gotten better post-Christmas. We have improved in the start of both the game and the start of the second half. Pre-Christmas the start of the game and the start of the second half were poor, but today we had both good starts in the first and second half. Our next stage is are we able when we have someone down can we keep them down and not let them get back in, and today Pitt was able to get back in. We really started well in the first half and I thought we have practiced well and how we practice is turned into how we play.”
On the rebounding effort:
“I looked at the stats and the defensive numbers and I thought that we played good defense, but when I see that Pitt shot 43 percent from three and 40 percent from the field so I’d like to see the numbers better than that, but the rebound margin was the big difference at plus 19. We had 15 offensive rebounds, 17 second chance points and 18 fast break points which was the difference there.”
On the turnovers in the second half:
“The pressure got us a little bit off guard and we fouled them a couple of times. Pitt got to the free throw line early and that’s how they were scoring, which gave them some confidence. We gave them a couple of open threes and we just weren’t scoring. We have had issues and they have affected us.”
On entering the game with a winning mindset against a young Pitt team:
“This is the ACC, the best league in the country. I don’t look at peoples records, every game is unique, and every game is its own separate unique deal. Coach Stallings is one of the best coaches in the country. His teams are very hard to play against, they are very well coached and very young. I knew it was going to be hard for us. We played with good energy, and the start of the game really gave us enough cushion to finish the game with a win.”
GEORGIA TECH SENIOR CENTER Ben Lammers
On having 16 rebounds in today’s win:
“I always try to get rebounds so it’s kind of a conscious effort. I wasn’t really expecting to get a specific number, but it happened. It’s one of those things where I don’t actively keep track.”
On the 21-1 run to start the game:
“It was very nice to see that because normally we don’t do that. We have gotten better at starting, but we’ve never had a start like that. It was nice to have that 20 point cushion and be on the winning side of that.”
PITT HEAD COACH KEVIN STALLINGS
Opening statement:
“I’m a little more disappointed today than I have been. I didn’t think we came out of the gate the way we need to in order to compete to win. The last couple games we started slowly, but this one was a little harder to take for me. You spot a team 20, it’s going to be hard to get back from that. We played like we did for the first four, five, six minutes, I don’t even know what it was, but we spent the rest of the day trying to claw back and make a game from it. It’s my responsibility to have them ready to play from the start and we weren’t ready to go. I thought we had some guys come in off the bench and play with some good energy. Despite Peace [Ilegomah]’s fouls, I thought he came in and played physically, I thought Samson [George] did, I thought Monty [Boykins] did, but that was a disappointing day to me.”
On if the loss was more disappointing because it seemed like a winnable game on the schedule:
“I think that there are games that you look at and say, ‘we might not be at as much of a talent disadvantage and experience disadvantage,’ but they are really good defensively and played really well offensively in the first half. They have been hard for people to score on consistently, and that is not just us, it has been good offensive teams, whether it’s Notre Dame, Miami, or whoever. To me, it was just that we did not come out to begin the game. We can’t come out like that in any game and win any of these games, we are just not set up that way right now.”
On the team’s struggle to score the ball this season:
“We are not a great scoring team. There is a lot of pressure on our perimeter guys because we do not score a lot around the goal, so we need to make shots, we need to get the floor spread to get it into the paint some. We are just not a great scoring team, and we particularly struggle to come up with easy baskets. That is what allows you to score sometimes, is getting easy ones, and we have a hard time creating easy ones.”
On if the team is progressing over the course of the season:
“I think that is the key too. In general, the answer to that question is yes. I think we are making progress and that you can see signs of guys getting better. Obviously, to ask me that question right now with what happened in that 40 minute game did not feel like there was a lot of progress made to me. But in general terms, I think you see signs of betterment here and there. We do have some, which I talked to the team about after the game, repetitive mistakes where we have a guy or two or three that we keep saying the same things to that we need to see some growth, but in an overall sense, I think the answer to your question is yes. I think there are signs of progress every day, but again, it’s a hard time for me to answer this question because that was not very good, I don’t think.”
On switching between different defensives throughout the course of the game:
“We have been putting it a zone in here for a little bit, a press too, so we actually started the game in zone and they hit two of their only three threes against it, so at 8-0 or whatever it was we called timeout and went man. We went back to it and it started being more effective, but in the first half, after we dug ourselves a tremendous hole, we had a wide open three to cut the thing to four; it was one of the best looks we had all day, but we didn’t make it. After we started playing the way we needed to play, we started fighting and getting back in to the game a little bit by pressing and playing a little bit of zone. We went back to man, back to zone, and tried to switch it up to what we thought would work. We got into some foul trouble, which didn’t help either, but it is something we have been working on, but just haven’t used as much as we thought we would.”
PITT SENIOR GUARD MONTY BOYKINS
On the run Georgia Tech had within the first five minutes of the game:
“It’s hard to start out a game 21-1, and you can’t really spot a team that many points and expect it to be easy to come back from. We just tried as hard as we could for the rest of the game to chip away at it every four minutes at a time and really do our best to try and get back in the game.”
On allowing another run at the start of game similar to the game against Duke:
“We try to treat every game the same whether it’s Duke or Georgia Tech. It doesn’t matter the name or the jersey. We try to come out with the same amount of energy at the beginning of each game and it didn’t happen today for us. They jumped on us early and that set the tone for the rest of the game. You have to learn how to gain momentum at the jump and try to do everything we can to stay in the game for as long as possible.”
