St. John's University Athletics
POSTGAME QUOTES: St. John's vs. NJIT
12/20/2015 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
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St. John's Head Coach Chris Mullin...
On the team's energy level:
"Overall, [the energy] level was pretty good. We took care of the ball and got 22 more shots. We got to the free throw line, but didn't make shots. I'll live with that. [Regarding] our energy, I thought we did a good job, but we didn't execute. I told the [team] we have to be more forceful and make an imprint on the game."
On being more forceful:
"At any level when you play with aggression and you put your imprint on the game, you dictate what goes on. The numbers would say we did that. If we made more shots we'd probably be sitting here with a win. I'm not discounting that. It's a skill thing and that happens some nights."
On concerns about the past two performances:
"Our routine is to look at the [last] game, put it behind us and try to perform better the next game. Ideally, there's no carryover whether it's a good or bad game. I can't say I'm concerned about [the recent struggle], but I also can't forecast it either. What we can forecast is how we prepare each and every day."
On the team's shot selections:
"I'm happy when we get shots. We had 10 turnovers and 70 shots, I'm good with that. I told them I'd rather have shots than turnovers so we did better there. The next step is to get good shots and make them."
Graduate Student Guard/Forward Ron Mvouika...
On today's performance:
"We just have to play with force consistently. We've been having ups and down during the games and the teams we're playing are coming at us from the beginning to the end. At some point we just have to get out of that dark cloud and play more consistent from beginning to end."
On the teams free throw shooting:
"Those are easy points. We have to do a better job [shooting from the line] starting with myself. That could be the game right there. If we make a couple more it changes the whole game."
Freshman Guard Federico Mussini...
On what the team needs to improve:
"I think we just need to play harder. Other teams cannot come in our gym and play harder than us. It starts with practice. If we practice harder, we will play harder in the game."
NJIT Head Coach Jim Engles...
On the breakout performance of Chris Jenkins:
"We know the guy is talented. We do a lot of things. I put a lot of pressure on these guys on the offensive end. We have to know a lot of things. Chris has a lot of talent, some guys are very quick to learn and some guys it takes a bit longer. When Chris transferred we knew he was capable of doing this. It's not surprising; I'd just like to see this more consistently. He was outstanding tonight."
On getting outrebounded:
"I mean that's the thing that keeps you up at night. We are a very small team but we take advantage of our matchups on offense. When you play teams like St. John's it's tough because of the amount of size and length they have and their ability to block shots. I was able to manage the lack of size tonight. We were very aggressive defensively and we were able to enforce our defense on them."
On the late 15-0 run to help win the game:
"I thought at that point our defense really stepped up. We were able to get some easy baskets because of our defense and that was a big piece of the game."
NJIT Junior Guard Damon Lynn...
On getting a win over a tough BIG EAST opponent:
"We knew it wasn't going to be easy. We came in here prepared. We came in here with a chip on our shoulder. We haven't been playing our best basketball so we wanted to come out today and show that we are a good team."
On the breakout performance of Chris Jenkins:
"I told him to go hard today and leave it all on the floor. That's it, just play your game. He can shoot the ball very well so shooting wasn't a problem; it was just getting on the floor and consistently knocking down shots."
On the late 15-0 run to help win the game:
"We just had to stay with it. The game isn't over until the final buzzer sounds. Just because you get down, doesn't mean the game is over. We came out and tried to enforce our will on the game."
