Nov. 26, 2015
Recap | Final Stats | Notes | USATSI Gallery
– GEORGIA TECH COACH Brian Gregory
On today’s performance:
“We knew that we were going to have to play extremely well for 40 minutes. We had to keep our concentration, effort level, and energy up because that’s the way Arkansas plays. They take advantage of every time you don’t do that and that’s exactly what they did this afternoon. To our guys’ credit, they responded well to some of the runs Arkansas made. It’s a tough team to play against because they force you, your concentration, and execution on every single play offensively and defensively. I’m pleased with our guys and I’m pleased with their response.”
“I’m really pleased with our seniors to be able to advance and play in a very prestigious preseason tournament. (We) have a chance tomorrow to play in the championship game.”
On team’s improvement:
“We’re much more improved offensively than we have been in the past. Our identity and the vision for this team will always be based on our defense and rebounding. We’ve been sporadic in both of those categories.”
“We’re still putting it together. We weren’t very good defensively in the first half. They shot 56 percent. There wasn’t a lot of rebounding for them out of the gate because they made every shot they took. In the second half, that was definitely more to how we need to play.”
“Our best chance to continue to improve is to continue to tighten up our offense, but still have our identity based on defensive rebounding.”
On Charles Mitchell:
“Nobody was better today than Charles. He’s gotten himself in shape. He’s able to play 32 minutes now and he’s able to do a lot of different things on the court for us.”
ARKANSAS COACH MIKE ANDERSON
On today’s game:
“First, I’d like to congratulate Georgia Tech. Early on, they established that they were going to attack the glass on us and I don’t think we did a very good job of keeping them off the boards. When you give a team 19 rebounds and 26 second chance points you normally get blown out, but that means we did some other good things. One thing I know we did was made some shots early, knocked some shots down. We left some free throws on the line, we turned the ball over, just unforced turnovers that led to baskets for them. So it just seemed like we continued to play uphill, but that’s the learning curve for our basketball team. We finally got away from home in a neutral state against a good Georgia Tech team that’s been playing well. Their experience versus our inexperience was very evident, so this team will continue to grow and learn how to win.”
On being out-rebounded:
“I don’t know if that has ever happened, where a guy gets 18 (points) and 18 (rebounds). But give them credit, they took advantage of it. We had some guys get hurt, I thought our lack of physicality was very evident and they took advantage of us. There were times we played small ball, not that we wanted to, one guy got hurt. Big Trey (Thompson), a guy that’s really big in our rotation, got hurt so it was kind of an uphill battle. But we battled and got right back in striking distance but we never could get over that hump. We know we have some shortcomings so some other guys really have to step up. I was really proud of Willy Kouassi, I thought that he went out and he played big for us. Maybe he’s that guy that should be out there that could be another guy of size that could give us some rebounding prowess.”
