Coach Hillsman Quotes
Syracuse vs. Marquette
February 6, 2010
Coach Hillsman
Opening Statement:
“Obviously, we are very happy in our home court. We knew it would be a very tough game. They are a very good team. They are a team that I really believe has a very skilled point guard that can do anything on the floor. Angel Robinson is a very good player. They run their stuff. That was a really good game for us today, to come back in and fight and take care of the ball the second half. The biggest key was that we had five turnovers in the second half. The first half turnovers were atrocious. They were just battling for the ball, not being aggressive. When we are not doing aggressive things with the ball we have an opportunity to lose basketball games. The second half we did aggressive things with the ball. Erica (Morrow) played a very good second half for us. She made good throws; she did the things that we told her to do. Carmen Tyson-Thomas was remarkable. She led the team, she is going to get better and I hope she can continue to do this. Nicole Michael, slinky was slinky. She was very aggressive and went to the basket. They were keeping us out of the paint, but we had to keep going and being aggressive. That is a situation where we want to play our game. I have to give my kids a lot of credit. We had fourteen less shots. They played a very good game down the stretch. We rebounded the ball and took care of the ball. When Erica got followed on that three, I told her in practice, about a week ago, in a game situation, ‘I don’t care if you punt the ball into the stands, you can’t throw it away.’ Her shot was kind of like a punt when she threw it up there, but it was one of those games where you don’t want to turn the ball over. Obviously, it paid off because this game was pretty close. I give her a lot of credit.”
On the changes in the second half:
“We reversed the ball and attacked the basket. In the first half we were not getting the ball fully reversed and whenever we did we got an easy lay-up. They had a good scheme on defense. They have a great matchup zone. Terry (Mitchell, Marquette Coach) is a very good matchup zone coach. It is tough to play against that. The only way to play against that is to move the ball and move you. If you don’t move the ball and you don’t move then you can’t score. The first half I thought we got dragged into the corner and started standing around. We started throwing the ball inside and started driving. That was a big key for the second half. We moved the ball, we reversed it and we attacked. We got shots and we got rebounds.”
On Marquette’s success of press in the first half:
“I really think their press created more tempo then it did steals. All they were doing was playing half court. When we turned the corner they were reaching from behind, getting tips. We were going baseline and they were trapping us and we kept bringing the ball to the corner. I don’t think the press hurt us, but I thought what they got on the backend of the press did. We were rushing and panicked because we only had fourteen seconds and that is a lot of time.”
On Carmen Tyson-Thomas performance:
“She is a complete player. She is a very good shooter and a very good rebounder. She is going to do good things. We need to keep her comfortable in the game setting.”
On Nicole Michael’s execution on full court press:
“When we didn’t see them playing behind, we knew if we ran a person up the sideline that we could get a look at the basket. The adjustment we made from St. Johns game, when we did a long pass, they called a push on Nicole (Michael). No matter what happened, we had to throw the ball to the paint. We got to the rim and got to the basket and that was very important for us. That always works out pretty good for us.”
On the momentum two wins in a row gives the team:
“One thing about our conference is that most of the time you want to be 500 in your conference with the tough competition. Our goal at this point is to be 500 or above. We are actually on track of where we need to be to be in the competition for the NCAA tournament. We hop to win two, three in a row and keep being aggressive.”
On upcoming televised games:
“I didn’t know we had one coming up. It is exciting. It is definitely exciting. Obviously, it is great for recruiting, great for our players and great to show everyone how great a team we are. We are very excited.”
