St. John's University Athletics
Postgame Quotes: St. John's 55, UConn 67
1/15/2009 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Jan. 15, 2009
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St. John's Head Coach Norm Roberts
Opening Statement:
"UConn is great team, they do a great job on the glass. We turned the ball over too much and gave them too many easy baskets in transition. We defended them pretty well and we did some good things offensively at times, but we were a little too careless with the basketball."
On team's injuries:
"Sean [Evans] twisted his knee when he hit knee to knee, but I think he'll be ok. Rob (Thomas) pulled his groin muscle so we'll wait and see what the doctors say on him. JBs been battling an ankle and his back has been bothering him a little but he'll be fine."
On sophomore forward Justin Burrell:
"He tried to play aggressive, but [Hasheem] Thabeet and the rest of them did a good job of guarding him. He had some opportunities to shoot it and probably didn't but he made some good passes in the post. I didn't think that he wasn't aggressive today, he only took 4 shots, but it's tough to score on their big guys."
On tonight's performance:
"We played hard, I have no doubt we played hard. It's tough out there. D.J. Kennedy is playing 40 minutes. Paris Horne is playing 36 minutes. We're dead tired and they're running guys in and out. You know we have two freshmen that we are trying to make point guards. It's hard, Quincy Roberts, we knew he was going to have some minutes at the point, but we thought he was going to be playing 10 minutes not 32 and not against the type of talent he's playing against. We'll just keep working with him and get him better. I thought he did a better job tonight than what he did against Pitt. There is lot of pressure on that position."
On going forward:
"We have to keep playing. Our guys understand that. We'll regroup, they're 18 and 21 years old, they're resilient. They'll wake up tomorrow with sunshine, they'll be fine. But they understand the situation we're in. We are in the stretch like every team in the BIG EAST is going to get where you're going to play three or four high ranked teams back-to-back. What we told our guys is that you cannot get your head down. What you have to do is learn. Tonight we could have let ourselves get knocked out but we didn't. We kept battling. So we learn from it and we get better and we just got to continue to get better from it. Every game is a different scenario than the next game."
On the future of St. John's program:
"D.J. Kennedy, Paris Horne, Dele Coker have had some good minutes. I think all of our young are getting better. We have some good recruits that we've already signed that are coming that will help us with our ball handling and our scoring. I'm real excited about that. We're still recruiting some other guys too, so the light is very bright and believe me, four years ago it was very dim. It wasn't near what it is now. Teams like a Providence, or UConn, they are going to lose guys in the next year and they're going to go down a little bit. We'll have juniors and seniors and then it will be our time to climb. That's how it is and that's how you have to do it in this league. There are no one hit wonders. That's how you have to do it, you just have to be tough and go through it."
Connecticut Head Coach Jim Calhoun
On St. John's:
"I thought Paris Horne was absolutely sensational. He is a really good player. I like D.J. Kennedy. I said to Justin Burrell, and I hope it happens, that he would get that thing off his face. You can tell it's bothering him. He is a much better player, you can see that it is just bothering him."
On tonight's game:
"It is exactly the kind of game that I predicted. St. John's is a team that if you don't fight, you are going to get beat. When we were down in the first half, we were starting to get beat. Then we started to fight in the last five or six minutes. We gave up four points in the last 20-something seconds. We came out in the second half and went back to fighting. That's what you have to do against a St. John's team."
More on St. John's:
"From my perspective, this team has a future, St. John's does. They have young, very good players and with a couple of additions they should be a very good basketball team next year. Even if they had Malik Boothe, they would have been able to handle the press a little bit better."
