Postgame Player Quotes
Syracuse vs. Cornell
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Carrier Dome/Syracuse, N.Y.
Andy Rautins, Jr. Guard
On securing the win in the second half:
“We stuck it out. We’ve showed time and again that we’re a second-half team and can get the Ws late. I don’t know if we want to be a second-half team because we could get buried and then we may not be able to come back."
On the danger of being a second-half team:
“We can get complacent in the first half and figure it’s ok that they have a lead because we’ve come back in so many games. We can’t have that mindset. We have to come out and have the mindset that we’re going to crush the other team and put them away early."
On needing to come out strong in the first half:
“We just tend to come out lackadaisical sometimes, but that’s our ultimate goal to put teams away early.”
Paul Harris, Jr., Forward
On whether they thought Cornell was going to be like Colgate:
“I really wasn’t thinking that. Cornell made the tournament last year and we didn’t, so I was thinking we need to beat this team. I think we came out a little sluggish. A lot of teams always play their best game in the Dome. They’re one of those teams."
On being comfortable coming back from behind:
“I really didn’t believe we were going to lose that game, no matter how much we got down. I thought once everyone came to their senses and we started playing together, being more patient and playing better man defense that we’d eventually come back. Slowly but surely we started to come back."
On it being dangerous to tend to come from behind for the win:
“That’s dangerous. They missed a lot of open shots. If they hadn’t missed those open shots, I don’t know what the outcome would have been."
On staying with the shooters:
“It’s hard. It’s hard to play against teams that keep running set after set and have you moving. Once they catch one man slipping, that’s when they put the shot up.”
Jonny Flynn, So., Guard
On what to do when teams are shooting well:
“A team can’t shoot like that the whole game. If a team shoots like that the whole game, then they deserve to win. All you can do is sit and wait. We dug ourselves a hole, but were able to get back out of it."
On what needs to happen for them to come out strong in the first half:
“I think we were ready to play, but Cornell just came out ready to make the shots. Some games it’s like that. You look at Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant, some days they’re going to score 50 points. That’s going to happen to us sometimes, guys are going to come out and make some shots and that’s what happened tonight. Tonight we overcame it. We picked up the defense in the second half and won the game."
On whether they were pressing when they were down by so much:
“I don’t think so. I think we did the same thing we usually do. It probably just looked like that because we were down. Sometimes when you’re down, you start to look at the game in a different way. I feel like we did the same thing we were doing before. We turned it around. We were down 16 and won the game and that’s big for us.”
