On if he could give out an award for most improved who would it be:
“That’s a great question and it’s hard to give it to one guy, because I think every guy has gotten better. I think (Santiago Vescovi) came back in the best shape. He was never in great shape. He wasn’t even in great shape at the end of the year, because he didn’t have a chance to get himself in great shape, because of what he was thrust into. I think Fulky and Yves both have improved in terms of what we need from them. Josiah has definitely improved. Olivier and Uros have gotten more confident in terms of understanding the system and I think that’s going to help them. We have big plans for those guys. V.J. Bailey was with us a year ago. V.J. has done well. E.J. in a short time has improved as much as anyone in his short time. He had to do a shot make over, which he did. It’s going to help him and he’s going to do exactly what you tell him to do. The younger guys. We know those guys are talented, but the starts and stops have definitely hurt them. They’ve shown glimpses of what they can be, but they’ve struggled physically at times, because the older guys don’t need as much, but can go all day long. The younger guys can’t go all day long, but they need to and they’re having to learn that in a year where all of these starts and stops definitely affect that part of their game. I know I’m all over the place with that question, but it’d be hard for me to pick one guy, because I think all of these guys have worked hard to improve and we’re going to find out starting tomorrow if the guys who have improved can they bring it when the lights come on.”
On mental management during period of tons of cancellations:
“It would be exactly what you would expect when you get your expectations up. A week before we got shut down we were excited. Think about it, I had passed three straight COVID tests on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I wasn’t feeling very good, but I was ready to go. So, we come in on Sunday to get ready for the game the following weeks, I test positive and then we get shutdown. We were all excited. We were right where we wanted to be. We had spent 10 days where we finally had everyone out there. We were scrimmaging and we had been playing a lot. We had played our way into shape, because we had been shut down. When we came back from that second shut down, we said that we had to play, because we wouldn’t have an exhibition game. We had three scrimmages with referees and we had been building up. Then you go 13 days without getting up-and-down the floor and now we’re going to play four or five days later. There’s no doubt that each time we shut down—and if you asked the players during that time if it was tough for them to watch college basketball get off to a start and them not being able to play? Yes. I didn’t want to watch it. I’ll be honest with you, I had a hard time wanting to watch college basketball. I had a hard time wanting to watch anything to be honest with you. The fact is though, the players were wanting to play. It is an emotional drain on everybody, because you’re getting excited and want to play. If there’s one common denominator through this, it’s that every player will tell you, ‘We want to play.’ This is the longest in my life since I’ve been around a team where we haven’t played a game, but I’ve never ever been a part of a program where you decide on your first game three days before you play it and we still have a game we want to make up. Looking back, I wish the NCAA had set a blanket set of dates to play 27 games and to get rid of the MTE’s, because there’s a lot of teams that will want to scramble to make up games. We would love to get to 25 games if we can, but right now we just want to get going tomorrow night. I would say now that there isn’t a game we won’t be able to play, because of where we are, but we don’t know where our opponents are and what they’re going to have to deal with. I had talked with Mark Few about possibly playing later on and they had, had a situation down in Florida and they were talking about how they were going to transport players. He and I had talked a few different times even after they had played in Indianapolis when they were getting ready to play Baylor. And, we just don’t know. It could be a year like that where you get ready to play and all at once, you can’t. Believe me, in the grand scheme of the world it’s not that big of a deal, but in terms of the world we live in and what we’re trying to do with our young players here, yeah, it’s tough on them. But, like I said, hopefully we can get going here and be blessed enough to not have any more interruptions.”