St. John's University Athletics
Pregame Quotes: St. John's vs. Georgetown
1/2/2014 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Jan. 2, 2014
Head Coach Steve Lavin
On the value of beating Georgetown:
"All of the games in your conference play end up being big for a variety of reasons. I would say Georgetown is a big game because of the history between the two schools and the feisty nature of the matchups."
On a few tough losses this season:
"No losses are good, but you can learn from setbacks. We need to improve in all aspects of play and the wins take care of themselves."
On Joshua Smith's influence on the Georgetown offense:
"They have variations of their offense now because Josh Smith is such a dominant force. When he's in the game they play through him more and when he comes out, they run more of a Princeton offense."
On the team's progress:
"Naturally we wish we were undefeated. With that said we are about where I thought we would be, which is a work in progress with a nice upside."
Junior Guard Phil Greene IV
On shot selection:
"We definitely talked about it. He kept it simple. If you draw crowds, pass out of the crowd. If it's one person guarding you, go to work. It's simple, don't dribble into a crowd, don't take bad shots and hit the open guy because we can all play on this team."
On Rysheed Jordan's improvement:
"He's improving a lot because he's being aggressive and showing a lot of confidence. The one thing that is helping the most is definitely his aggression on the court."
Junior Guard/Forward Sir'Dominic Pointer
On Georgetown:
"We definitely don't want to drop two straight, especially in the league. It's a tough league, and we definitely don't want to lose to Georgetown. We're going to go in and play hard and hopefully we get the win. We are going to go in and play our game. They're going to play their game and hopefully we come out with a W."
On what St. John's learned last game against Xavier:
"In this game, we started off fast, but we learned we have to sustain it because we came out slow in the second half. We have to be consistent throughout the whole game. That's been our problem this year, and we have to keep working and trying until we get it right."
On what led to the slow second half start last game:
"I'm not sure, but we've got to watch film and decipher what it is. We have to figure it out fast because BIG EAST play is here now, and we can't afford to lose games that we know we should win"
Sophomore Forward Max Hooper
On the team's "resume" at this point in the season:
"As a team, we look at our resume, but we don't compare it to other teams at this point. Internally in our basketball family there are certain standards and things that we establish as goals and expectations for ourselves so the things that are happening outside of our team aren't important to us. Our focus is on our performance in the next game and our performance continued on. The other teams in our league, that will take care of itself."
