Postgame Quotes - Wake Forest 71, UNC 87
1/21/2015 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
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Wake Forest Head Coach Danny Manning
Opening statement...
"Tonight was a game where Carolina came out and established themselves and we didn't respond the way that we planned to respond. We didn't respond in a way that we wanted to respond and we put ourselves in a hole. Looking at the stat sheet, they came out and they did things they wanted to do and we didn't take away things that we wanted to take away. We didn't get what we wanted from the offensive end as much as we would have liked. Coach Williams had his team ready to go and we didn't respond the way we should have responded."
On shot selection...
"Guys know when they should shoot and shouldn't shoot. There are always some shots guys shoot every game for various reason. I'm not as worried about shot selection as much as I am worried about 50 points in the paint, or 10 second chance points, or 10 fast break points. That's 70 of their 87 points right there that I think, if we do a better job, we could eliminate some of those. Offensively we need to be aggressive we need to make sure that we understand time, score momentum, and I want our guys to be aggressive when they have the basketball. We have to make sure we have good floor balance when we take the shot and the shot is a good rhythm shot for us."
On attacking UNC's zone...
"They were active. They were long in it. But I thought we got good shots against the zone. We got the ball to the high post and dropped it down. We got some looks on the wing where we want it. We obviously didn't make enough. The percentage wasn't good but we had seven threes on the game."
On the defensive effort...
"We have to do a much better job of guarding and that's not just post players that's everybody. We got to do a better job of guarding our man. There isn't a science to it. Guard your man."
On the problems keeping them out of the paint...
"We didn't stay in front of our man. That's the way you get into the paint, you get past your man. We need to do a better job of staying in front of the ball. It's a little bit easier to say than to do. That's what the game comes down to. It doesn't matter what level that you are playing. Whether you are playing bitty basketball whether you are playing junior high basketball or high school basketball, stay in front of your man and keep them out of the paint."
North Carolina Head Coach Roy Williams
Opening statement...
"It was a weird night for us. We were a little low on personnel. We lose Theo [Pinson] and lose Nate [Britt] at the end too. Justin Jackson played the entire second half, and we needed him to do some things like that. It's a tough stretch with four games in an eight day period. Our shot selection in the second half was much better than it was in the first half. I thought in the second half, offensively we were really good. We played more zone tonight than we've played in all of the other games put together, but we did because we had too. It was a good win. We feel good about it."
On North Carolina's reason for playing a zone defense in the second half...
"I knew that [Wake Forest struggles shooting from the perimeter,] but it had nothing to do with the reason we did it. I wanted JP [Tokoto], Marcus [Paige,] and Kennedy [Meeks] to have a chance to be in it at the end of the game. We did it strictly to see if we could stay out of foul trouble. I think that [Dinos] Mitoglou hit two threes and somebody else made one, and that was when we even substituted. Then we went to a half-court trap just to try to, you know, they pay me a lot of money to think sometimes. That's what we did."
On the progression of the North Carolina backcourt this season...
"I said in the first press conference, I said that a couple of guys had to step up and be big-time players. And I'll still say that right now, because on the perimeter, we're okay. Marcus [Paige] hasn't played the way I wanted him to play, or the way he wants to play. But if the big guys give us those kinds of numbers, that's pretty doggone good."
On the game plan for Devin Thomas and Codi Miller-McIntyre...
"[Thomas] is the guy that we try to concentrate on. There's no question about it. I thought Georgia Tech worked extremely hard to try to slow him down. I watched the Wake Forest games against Duke and Louisville and he just killed everybody. So if you're the coach, you're supposed to try to emphasize cutting back on the advantages that their best scorer has. So we tried, but we were fortunate that he missed a couple of easy ones too. He was something that we emphasized. Codi Miller-McIntyre too, because he goes to the hole so hard. We tried to build a wall to slow him down. It didn't work very often, but a couple of times it did."
Wake Forest Junior Guard Codi Miller-McIntyre
On the reason for tonight's loss...
"I think the main issue is the idea of having potential. We have the potential to be good, but with that means there will be inconsistency. We've been playing really good defense up until tonight. They shot 70 percent in the second half, 50 points in the paint, it has a lot to do with guards ball pressure and bigs positioning when their bigs catch the ball. Rebounding, we have to do a better job. I think the two leading rebounders had 12, six and then the next person had four. We have to do a better job with that definitely, especially if we want to win games against a better team like Carolina."
On how the team responded to North Carolina's zone in the second half...
"I want to say indecisive. A lot of times our guards had open shots but contemplated about it (and) hesitated to shoot it. And then also with that you still have to attack the zone. Zone doesn't mean just sit back and shoot threes. We did a great job of attacking Syracuse's zone, and I think today we kind of allowed their zone to affect us and not be decisive with our ball movements and decision making. "
On being more passive tonight than the rest of the season...
"The only thing I keep coming back to is the idea of having potential. We can be really good - I'm tired of saying that and I'm tired of hearing that, because it does nothing. 1-5 in the ACC doesn't reflect how good we are, and that's the most frustrating thing at the end of the day. If we don't get tired of losing as a whole, and as a team, we could be 1-5, 1-6, 1-7 and so on."
On the tone in the locker room after the game...
"We took steps backward because we didn't compete like we know we can, and this is a reminder how right at the beginning of the year as a whole everybody didn't come ready to compete. I think a lot of people came out and respected Carolina a little bit too much, forgetting that we can play with anybody and we've proven that. We can't have mental lapses like that."
