On Yves Pons and his production in the first few games of the season
“Probably pressing a little bit because you know again Yves is one of those guys. He’s a perfectionist. he puts so much time into the game and he works at it. I don’t think he can work any harder to be quite frank. He’ll make it, he’ll get it going. You guys have watched him over time. He rebounded well the first game. I didn’t think he had the same mindset rebounding in the second game as he needs to. Maybe that’s pressing a little bit, because he went one-for-nine in the first game, but he’ll be fine. We don’t worry about Yves because he’s going to give you everything he’s got and there’s not a better fix it guy in the country. I mean it’s things that he cleans up and the things that he does defensively a lot of people don’t notice that are really valuable to our team.”
On Tennessee’s fast break offense
“Well our fast break offense has been good. It can be a whole lot better. It’s important because we want to be an attack team. We want play really good defense and get out and run. Like any team in the country we want to get as many opportunities in the open court as we can. Try to have a place of advantage basketball where we got numbers based on the other team and we’ve been ok with it. We’ve shown some good signs, but there’s so much more that comes with our transition game than we’ve shown. Again, it’s a matter of getting everybody to understand it, but we wanted to advance it as quick as we can. We love to get it down the floor as quick as we can but we want to play out of it. If not, we want to be able to flow where it looks like they were. We just don’t want to do a lot of standing around. The last two games we’ve had to go up against zone more than we probably thought. Certainly, in the first game. We’ve spent some time with it today because Appalachian State will do a little three-quarter court 1-2-2 press back to a 2-3 zone. We expect to see that and we just got to continue to work our zone offense but the fast break is so important to us. Teams are going to work to take it away from us. There’s no doubt about it but we still think we can get it and we certainly have to fight to get it and will continue to do that.”