Postgame Quotes: Kentucky 83, UCLA 44
December 21, 2014 | Men's Basketball
Kentucky 83, UCLA 44
December 20, 2014
UCLA head coach Steve Alford
opening statement
Well, obviously a very difficult first half. Haven't been involved in many halves like that, and I'm sure our guys haven't, either. That was the tough part. I thought we settled down much more in the second half, had a little bit of a tendency to do that in the Gonzaga game as well. But when you're playing a team like this, you just can't get yourselves in a hole like we got ourselves in a hole in the first 20 minutes. That's a tough one. There are no excuses. We just didn't get the job done on either side of the ball in that first 20 minutes, and that made it really, really difficult for us.
Bryce Alford
on slow starts for UCLA
“I can't really tell you honestly. We've just got to focus more and be ready to play right out of the gate. We can't come out scared. We can't come out tentative or passive. We've got to come out and know the capabilities we have as a team and trust each other and trust our abilities and just be aggressive right out of the gate.”
on how much credit Kentucky deserves for starting the game on a 24-0 run
“Obviously they're one of the best teams in the country, if not the best team in the country right now. You've got to give credit to them. They made it extremely hard on us, and they took our confidence out of us right at the beginning of the game. They put it to us from then on. Definitely a lot of credit to them.
Coach Alford
on what he tells his team after calling timeout with UCLA trailing, 16-0
You know, it's not because they don't care and they're not trying. The guys are trying hard, and they're giving great effort. It's just when nothing goes right, it gets very frustrating and kind of steamrolls. I think that's what happened at the start of the game. The ball didn't move. We took shots off zero, one, two passes, and you're playing a defensive team like this, this team is long. I have been coaching 24 years, and I thought Bo Ryan's team during my fourth year at Manchester, when we were both 31-0, I thought that was an awfully good team that we played in the championship game from a Division III standpoint. I don't know in my 20 years of coaching at the Division I level that I've coached against a better team than what this team looks like.
“They have everything. They can shoot the basketball much better against us tonight than they have in the long time, but they're long, they're athletic, they present so many problems for you because they're so deep, and your first question to Bryce, how does it happen when you list Carolina and Gonzaga and Kentucky? When we played them, I think Carolina was sixth, Kentucky is one, Gonzaga is nine. This is a team that is full of inexperience. It's not an excuse. We had three guys go hardship. This team we just played had three guys that could have entered the draft and came back. There's a reason why they're where they're at, and our guys are fighting. As long as they keep fighting and we learn, we're probably not ready. I'm not giving any excuses for 41-7. That should not take place. That's bad, and our guys know that, and they feel bad about it. The next 20 [minutes], we settled down. We had similar games against [North] Carolina and Gonzaga, but they're not ready for that. We've got one returning starter, Norman Powell. He was the only guy in the starting lineup for us last year. In my mind, those are the reasons for those three games. Now, in a month from now, will we be able to play a team that's nationally ranked and do the things? I hope so. That's what we have to be able to do.
“But the expectation obviously is big, regardless. I told the media at the beginning of the year, you've got to be patient. I've said it, there are going to be games where you go, whoa, how did these guys do that, and then there are going to be games just like today where you go, whoa, how did that happen? But I'm not going to quit on these guys. Am I frustrated and down? Sure. But we'll get back. After the break, we'll get back and we'll keep fighting. This group will keep getting better. But they're a little bit inexperienced. I told my guys that in my 24 years of coaching, this is the best team I've coached against. This team is really, really good. It doesn't excuse a 41-7 half, but we'll get better and we'll learn from it.”
Bryce Alford
on what his teammates said to each other at halftime
“That is the hard part. None of us have ever been in that situation. None of us have ever had a seven-point half before, been down that much at half or really at any point. Yeah, it's tough, and as leaders with Norm and myself and even Kevon, we've got to try to just keep our spirits up and just have everybody believe, not only in themselves but each other and just try to keep the spirits up and get us ready to go out and have a better second half.”
Kevon Looney
on facing an opponent that has this many players of 6-foot-11 and taller
“It was pretty difficult. Hard to get scoring angles on your layups and try to finish over the top, the real long, great shot blockers. But it was a lot of fun and a great experience playing out there. Hopefully we see them again, because that was embarrassing and we want another stab at it. But it was a lot of fun, and that was really good. It makes it really difficult.”
on what whether he is conscious of his team being down 24-0 early in the game
“Very, very conscious of it. You've got to score a basket. That's terrible. You never should play a game where you score seven points in a half. Coach drills us better than that in practice, and we're a much better offensive team than that. Going through my head, we've got to score. We've got to make the game closer, and we couldn't do it.
on how Kentucky played defense, as opposed to other teams UCLA has faced
“I would say mainly just the size. We couldn't get to the basket how we wanted. When we did get there it wasn't easy to finish. When we was driving we wanted to kick it out and we didn't get movement in the first half, so their shot blocking really made a difference.
Coach Alford
on Kevon's enthusiasm, saying he wants another shot at playing Kentucky
“Not right now. I appreciate Kevon's enthusiasm, but not right now. But Kevon, I've been around a long time as a player and as a coach, and I played for the best in Coach Knight. When you talk about a Dream Team, a team that -- other than Ulis, who then Ulis comes in and gives you a whole different element because the starting five that they have, they can basically switch five ways, and Coach Knight, I think that was always his dream, that he could get five guys 6'7" and 6'8" and just switch everything. That's hard to score on. That's why if you look at their numbers, they're holding teams. We scored 42. When we came into this game, they were holding teams to 48. We're not the only team that they've really pounded that way from that standpoint. They're really good defensively. They can switch on you. They guard the pick-and-rolls well, and then when you beat them -- and I thought we did, we got some angles, we beat them, but then you've got two guys 6'10", 6'11", 7-foot, one of them jumps, if he misses it, the other one gets it. You don't see that kind of size, and I think that affects you. That is hard to prepare for. Going into a week here and trying to prep for this, you can't simulate what you see. I joked with Cal [John Calipari] before the game because Coach Schilling came up to me before the game and said, hey, I know when you prepare for teams and then you see them in person, the majority of the teams have over-hyped sizes and the sizes aren't correct. He came up to me, and he goes, that's not true with this team. It's legit. What they are size-wise is legit. When you have that kind of size, you can do so many different things defensively. Give Cal credit, give his staff credit. They've really got this team playing hard at the defensive end. They continue to play at that level defensively, I'm a firm believer they've got a chance to run this thing out. They're that good, they're that talented."
on how he uses this game as a teaching tool
“You communicate with them just like we did at halftime, just like we did at postgame. I don't know how much video you want to show them of this game, because it's a sensitive deal, because we've got to have confidence moving forward. But there's teaching moments. For instance, in the first half, the ball didn't move. We are a team where the ball has got to move. In the second half, the ball moved, and we got better shots, and we made shots. Even if we would have missed those shots in the second half, we got better shots in the second half. So we can teach that way.
“Defensively, we've got to look at how we're guarding, how we were set up. For instance, we didn't really want to come off Booker and we give him all kinds of open looks. So, we have a lot of breakdowns, and right now our defense is too much predicated on what's happening offensively. If we're good offensively then we do some better things defensively, and that's what a young, inexperienced team does. We've got to learn from that. We've got to get tougher and nastier and better defensively, which I think that'll help our offense. These three ranked opponents, they bring those things out in you. That's why they're ranked. That's why they're really good. They're going to exploit that and bring it out, and those things have been exposed. It hadn't been so exposed in the other games. We've been able to do pretty well in those, but when you play teams like that, that's going to get exposed to you."
on whether Kentucky looks different on tape against teams such as Kansas or Texas
“You know, that's hard. Obviously, they probably played really well against Kansas, and they played really well against us. [John Calipari] Cal told me it was the best they've played all year. He might have been just being nice. But those are two games that I would say they played at a really high level. But you're 12-0. What's the win margin? 28 coming into tonight? That didn't go down. You've got a win margin of 30-plus and you've played 12 games and you've played the likes of Kansas and UCLA and played Providence and played Texas, and they played a pretty good schedule. And they're 12-0 with a plus-30 win margin, and they're holding teams to about 45 points. So even if you say, hey, Columbia played them a little bit tougher or Boston did, you have got a target on your back the size of the state of Kentucky. For them to perform at that level [when] you are coming into break, those are always tough games to begin with. I thought they were tremendous. Cal has got them playing at a very high level, believing in what they want to do. Like I said, I don't know of too many teams in my career that I've coached against that's been any better.
on what it will take for any team to defeat Kentucky this season
“They are a hard team to man, and we tried zoning, and that didn't work. So we went man, and they're a very difficult team to man because they've got very good inside out. If the Harrisons shoot and play that way, I thought they were really under control and did a lot of good things tonight as far as shot selection, and if they make shots like that, they even become harder to play against because they're just so hard to guard. I would think if a team can come in with a lot of length and throw a zone out there that's got length and really gets them out of the paint to where they have to shoot jump shot after jump shot, okay, and that might sound like a good game plan, but they rebound. For every two shots they take, they rebound one of them. It's just a hard team to play against. I think their key is defensively. I really think this is a team that if you guard them well and they score 50 points and shoot 20 percent from the field, they still beat you because they hold you to 35. I just think that's their makeup. This team is focused. It's driven. There's not a weakness on the team. It wasn't a fun team for me to watch today, but I'll enjoy watching it the rest of the season, because it's good basketball that's really well coached with really good players.
on having coached a team that advanced to a title game undefeated and what it takes for any team to achieve that level of success over the course of a season
“I did it at the Division III level. Bo [Ryan] and I both had undefeated teams going into that, but that was fun. You're going to be down six or seven with a minute to go and try to figure a way that pull that out. Who knows what's going to happen in league play. But they're such a dominant team, I think it really is a mindset. If they have no injuries, further injuries, it's really a mindset within the players. They know what they have to do. It's just staying driven where you've got to play pretty much all of us are going to be playing two games a week now, so you're away from the three games in three days, or we went through seven games in 14 days. You're away from that now. Now it's two games a week. Really taking care of their bodies off the court, not listening to all the – it's going to be hard because they're going to get praised a lot, and they deserve that praise. But if what they truly want and what they're truly trying to get to, you've got to kind of block all that out and listen to your coaching staff and know that there's still room to get better, and that's the scary part about them. I think they can probably still get better as they continue to get more and more experience and they go along this thing. As it grows, I think a lot of times you think that there becomes more pressure. I think as it grows, they're going to get hungrier with it. Just looking at their demeanor, this thing reaches 18, 19, 20 in a row, you may not get them because I think they'll get really hungry and think that they can do it now.”
