On freshman Olivier Nkamhoua’s Saturday performance, playing time and rotations going forward:
“Olivier did okay. I put him in and when I took him out, I said he took two shots and the first one wasn’t a very good shot and the second one I get it, but that’s not why I’m taking you out. We talked the night before and he said to me that his number one job was to play defense and rebound, and in that short span of missing those two shots, he gave up two baskets. Not easy ones, but he could have guarded better and he actually did when he went back in. We think that Olivier can score. I do think the more he’s out there, the more comfortable he will get mentally probably more than anything.
“I still think we’re going play 11 people going forward. We still have confidence in E.J. (Anosike) and Uros (Plavsic) and we want those guys to play. It’s hard to get beyond that 10 or 11 guys. It really is, because we’re still trying to get the consistency going. We had planned on really starting the younger guys a couple weeks back, but we couldn’t do it because of the injuries. We’ve been hit with that all year, and we want to get out there in practice and get that rhythm we want. This group of guys work hard, knowing that when their number is called, they’ll be ready for the opportunity they’ve been waiting on. We do want to keep the minutes down and in a perfect world, we like to keep everybody under 30 minutes in a game. We feel good about guys playing 28 minutes or somewhere in there. We think we’re all much more affective when we can do that, but for us to do that, we’ve got to get consistent play from our bench.”
NEXT: Rick Barnes media availability continued