University of North Carolina Athletics
Post-game Coach Quotes
December 4, 2002 | Men's Basketball
Dec. 4, 2002
Head Coach Matt Doherty
"Illinois played an excellent ball game. He did a better job coaching than I did and his team executed better than my team. We came out with a great start, but it is a 40 minute game and they played excellent basketball for 34, 35 minutes, they played a lot better than we did. There will be days like this. I'm proud of my team, I'm proud of where we are right now. I'm disappointed in the way we played, the way we performed - but I'm proud of these guys and what we've accomplished in six short games. We'll bounce back. We have to - we've got a tough game on Saturday against Kentucky.
On giving up points in the paint in the first half: "I knew that. Bill does a good job with that high-low stuff, and they're strength is one of the things that we are concerned about. They have four guys that are big, strong post players and they did a good job of going high-low, and we didn't deny the ball reversal and put as much pressure on the ball as we would have liked and that hurts. They executed, again, better than we did.""
On Sean Arrington's game: "We can't let him shoot open jumpers. You look at the stats: he took nine shots, eight are threes. Coming into the game, all those shots were threes except one. They did a good job of running him off screens and we didn't do a good job chasing him. When we did trap, they seemed to find him. When there was penetration, they seemed to swing it to him. And he caught it in rhythm and made shots.
We're disappointed - we shot 51.5 percent. We've been doing great with our field goal percentage defense but we let them have too many easy looks, and then they had 14 more shots than we did, which was disappointing. I'm surprised we didn't get blown out on the boards, but they shot a better percentage than we did, and we had 19 turnovers. We can't turn the ball over. They had 11. We've been forcing a lot of turnovers and they forced turnovers against us, and that led to easy baskets."
Difference in second half: "It's hard to answer questions like that without watching the film. I don't know, I just think that every team brings a different style. Sometimes it comes down to match-ups, where you may match up better with another team and tonight we didn't match up very well with them, and again, I have to look at the tape before I can make some better comments."
On defense: "If you look at the way we came out, we came out playing great basketball. We took some bad shots and we turned the ball over. That gave them the opportunity to score and go against an unset defense. Our defense is good when it's set - but if you're giving them the opportunity for three-on-twos, two-on-ones, they're going to get good shots. I think that's a big part of it."
