Obviously I'm a little biased but I think he's the best player in the conference. He's been so important because he brings such intensity and work ethic, and he automatically draws a double.
I don't know that you get a whole lot out of losing and saying that you played well. But I thought we played really hard. We didn't quit, and we weren't intimidated.
But we would have traded all the awards for a chance to still be playing.
We took an enormous number of threes, more than we ordinarily want to take. The shots were there. We had a lot of open threes, but they just didn't go down tonight.
Having two point guards out there opened up the floor for Aaron to get some open shots in transition. With three guards, our perimeter defense got a lot better. Baker is our best on-the-ball defender. With him in the lineup, we became a lot more aggressive defensively.
I thought we played really hard for a 10-minute spurt in the second half. We tried to create turnovers and speed the game up. But we were down by over 20 to a good team that plays ball control, and it was too much to overcome.
I think sometimes we rely too much on Kenny alone. We play a much better game when we play a full game, relying on our shooting and contesting other teams shots.
Overall, I thought this was probably our best stretch of man-to-man defense that we've played all season. Now, we just have to keep working at that. We've been playing better. The last four games, I think we probably are playing our best basketball. It's coming together.
That was our low point of the season. We had eight games remaining. I challenged them personally and as a team to make a commitment to play defense, to make a commitment to win all eight.
That was one of things we talked about. We wanted him to lead the nation in rebounds. He?s done a real good job with that and what?s he?s really done is played with a lot of intensity in our practices and games. He?s the hardest worker.
We're capable of winning this thing. That's why we're here.
With the three guards, we started moving the ball. We started making the extra pass, rather than just throwing the ball to Kenny and watching him play.
We didn't show a great deal of patience. I thought one of the reasons we had been so successful in the month of February is our patience on offense.
We didn't have an answer for Hassan for the entire game.
We started well, but we had some personal issues. We had to discipline a couple guys. A potential starter, Bo Taylor, was released from the team. Bernard Lowndes got hurt.
We didn't get to their shooters early. They made shots.
Every time it seemed like we were making progress, something happened ... Bernard's injury, Bo Taylor's dismissal. For a while, we struggled.
Billy?s doing a great job spreading the floor and making you guard them.
Every time volunteers go out and help after a house fire, they're doing it on the faith that we're going to get the money from somewhere to pay that bill. We need community support to keep doing the good things we're doing.
That's what we were talking about as coaches after the game, the fact that we didn't fold when Kenny went down. It's great to have guards.
It's a good draw. New Hampshire is a team that we definitely respect, they're the only team that beat Albany, and when they're shooting they are extremely tough to defend.
It seemed like he could turn it on anytime he wanted to.
He's so quick and so good with the ball. It seemed like he could turn it on pretty much whenever he wanted to.
He really is a model citizen and a model student athlete.
The guys have really responded. Defensively, they've taken it more personal, played a lot harder and a lot more together.
