John Brady Ball Quotations

We decided we'd get the ball to Phil to make plays, and he made many big plays. His yards after a catch, which were at least 10 or more, were just amazing.

Certainly our team has a nice confident way about it right now. The execution we showed tonight and the way we shot the ball and rebounded the ball was quite good. I can't pay enough compliments to these three guys here and the rest of our team.

We've got to have a good team defensive effort on him. It will be about how we handle him coming off screens without the ball and how we handle him when he comes off screens with the ball. There'll be a couple of different ways that we'll try to guard him, and we'll see which one works the best as the game progresses and adjust as we go.

We throw the ball inside every time down the court, and we shoot six foul shots. That's pretty good guarding to me.

His pre-reads would determine where he would throw the ball. He knew where he was going to throw the ball before it was snapped.

That effort was not something you coach, but it's something you recruit. He allows us to put more pressure on the ball and let him roam and protect the basket.

We got better offensively in the second half. We rebounded the ball a little bit better the second half. We got to the foul line the second half, which is what we wanted to do the whole game.

We were going to double team him on ball screens and not let him get a comfort zone of coming off the screen with the ball. We were going to bump him every time he tried to go through the lane. The unique thing about it, you can play good defense, but when you can play good defense aggressively as we did without fouling, I think that's a key.

We didn't have any timeouts, so we have a 45 set that we put Darrel Mitchell in a corner, and we hand him the ball and have our two post men (Davis and Thomas) go run and set a double stagger screen on him and just let him find a way to shoot it.

We tried to score a little too quick against their zone. We got the ball where we wanted, but we tried to score without getting the ball reversed.

We scored nine points and had 10 turnovers in the first half against a zone! When I tell the team to be patient I don't mean make 40 passes, just four. Every time we worked the ball around, we got it inside.

Florida will have a few more weapons to score the ball than we do. Florida can shoot the ball a little bit better. They can spread them out a little more.

I've said all along that if our perimeter holds up, we're a pretty good team. So far our perimeter hasn't shot the ball as well as maybe we would have liked, but I think we've made some timely shots in critical moments of games that have helped our team.

They stayed with the double team. A lot of guys hedge him high and then run back. They stayed with it and made him give the ball up.

Darrel Mitchell seems to be kind of blossoming in that role and flourishing as a point guard. His assist-to-turnover ratio is quite good (4.6 assists to 2.9 turnovers a game). He defends well. He's really scoring the ball well for us. He's probably the key to our team. He's extremely consistent at what he does.

You throw the ball up to him 10 times, and nine of those times he will come up with the ball.

That's the best defense without fouling -- as physical a game as I thought it was -- that we've seen. We drove the ball inside almost every trip down the floor and we shot foul shots six times. That's pretty good guarding to me.

But he combines power with finesse. He's got great footwork, tremendous hands; he can shoot the ball up to 17, 18 feet good enough. And he can put it on the floor and go by you, so he's pretty much a complete basketball player.