Post Game Quotes From Ohio State vs. Massachusetts – Ohio State Buckeyes
12/10/2000 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Dec. 10, 2000
Recap| Box Score| Notes
University of Massachusetts Head Coach James “Bruiser” Flint
“The key to the game? We shot 19 percent.”
“We played tentatively against Johnson. I told them he will block it every time you look tentative. You have to take it to the chest, right to the chin and let him know we came to play.”
“When we did shoot, Johnson probably blocked eight of our shots.”
“I asked him if he knew how much time was on the clock and he said yes but he was thinking about whether he should shoot a three or take it to the basket. The funny thing is that just yesterday at the end of practice we worked on game situations. I thought he was going to drive it.”
On the sub of Micah Brand for Jackie Rogers:
“He elbowed someone. These are the types of things that have been killing us the entire season.”
“One thing we’ve been working on is situations.”
“Being tentative is a big problem with our shooting. We missed some close shots, we shot 19 percent and we were three feet from the basket, right where we wanted to be to make the shot.”
“We don’t have a schedule where we can afford to only play twenty minutes of basketball. We need to learn to play for 40 minutes.”
Ohio State head coach Jim O’Brien
I was impressed with how hard our team played. We were not good offensively, but it was our defense that carried us through this game. I was especially impressed that we could hold them (Umass) to a 25-percent shooting percentage and still win by three points. Our guys just got after the ball.
I told the guys before the game that their (UMass’) record really doesn’t show how good a team they are. If Umass plays as well as they did tonight, they have a chance to win a lot of games. This was an extremely good win for us.
We kept bringing the ball in and that helped our cause defensively. We can’t count on Ken Johnson to block shots all the time. Obviously we were disadvantaged with them (Umass) getting 17 rebounds.
They guarded us well. We were had no good looks inside and we weren’t able to get the ball inside. I thought we really lost our composure on the offensive end of the game. We had too many bad runners and we stepped out of bounds too much. But, I give them (Umass) credit. They have some tough kids on their team.
(Will) Dudley played well in the brief minutes he had tonight. It’s hard for him to get mintues with Ken Johnson in the game. Hopefully in the future we will reach a comfort level where we can use both. Will is definitely at a disadvantage behind Kenny.
