On what kinds of issues he saw in this game that were similar in their last loss on the road to Ole Miss:
“It’s consistency—knowing who you can count on from game to game. Again, when I say aggressive, I don’t think there’s any question our guards are trying to be aggressive. We aren’t getting any aggression from our post players in terms of the thrust we need from those guys. That can be rebounding the ball at a high level. If you aren’t going to score, that’s ok, just go do something else to impact the game. You can impact this game in a lot of different ways, whether it’s that some guys can score and impact it, other guys can impact it in other ways, and I just don’t think we are as consistent as we need to be. I will say that comes from our older players and the guys that have been around playing enough minutes, because the younger guys are still learning and they’re going through it. They do bring the thrust we are talking about, we just need it from other guys as well.”
On what are some things they need to do on the defensive end to go back to their defensive production levels when Yves was healthy:
“Well, some of the scoring goes back to high possession games, and when we we’re trying to play in a high possession game, where there are more opportunities for the other team to score. When you go back to the numbers, I haven’t looked at them right here. When you look at it, they shot 52 percent, and I look at that more than the number of points. When you shoot 52 percent, you are going to win a lot of basketball games at this level. When the other team is shooting 35 percent, there is a lot of possessions that come from high scoring. So, it’s the other things we’ll look at, not just the number of points. We like to keep people under 70, but 50 percent is not going to win games for you. What we need to do—and I said it earlier—is we normally do a pretty good job of guarding sets, and when it gets down to one on one defense, we have to get better.”
NEXT: Rick Barnes postgame continued