Washington 97, No. 19 Oregon 92
January 25, 2002 | Men's Basketball
Washington 97, Oregon 92
Bank of America Arena, Seattle, Wash.
January 24, 2002
Post-game Quotes
WASHINGTON HEAD COACH BOB BENDER
General Remarks
"Tonight is a real credit to those kids and how they played, everything that they showed tonight, I am very proud of them. They did it together and they did it during a time when they could have looked over their shoulder and said, 'here we go again,' but they didn't. We talked about getting 40 minutes and contributions from everybody. With this team we try to keep it consistent. This is the player's belief in doing what they know they are capable of doing, especially in a game that is a rivalry game and in a game that we needed for our confidence. We also needed to help ourselves in the league. I am very proud of what we were able to do in that regard."On Oregon's up-tempo offense "We, as coaches, made our players very aware of Oregon's numbers offensively. They are the leading offense in the Pac-10 and top-five in the country. They want to play fast and we knew we had to slow them down, but we didn't do that very well tonight. We were able to get ourselves some easy baskets. The quicker tempo was not as much a problem as it could have been, it worked actually to be a positive."
On responding to challenges "I think we have the ability to be resilient. There have been three games where we really haven't given ourselves the chance to win. But in every other thing we have done, we have shown the ability to come back from something, whether it be a close loss where we let it slip away or in this case, coming back from a beating like we took at Stanford. It says a lot that we have resilience and I would have not been able to predict how we would've reacted over these three days. Practice was excellent, we challenged people and they came through. We took Grant Leep out of the lineup and he responded well, we put Josh Barnard with the second group and he responded well. C.J. Massingale worked his way back into the starting lineup."
On Doug Wrenn "Doug was tremendous tonight, most importantly how he played down the stretch. We got him the ball exactly where he needed it, and sometimes he didn't finish and get the bucket, but his composure was tremendous. He is a scorer and he has the confidence to shoot the three, but what I like about Doug right now is that he is recognizing that he needs to go to his strengths. I haven't had a player like him, who has been asked to do so much offensively, and is still willing to do so much defensively. You just don't get players like that. I think he is accepting that dual role and that is special."
OREGON HEAD COACH ERNIE KENT
On best shooting every time out
"It's not only a best shot because you were leading the conference with USC and ranked 19th in the country that's part of it. The other part of it is with Oregon State, Washington, and Washington State having such a sense of urgency right now they are fighting. They're fighting for their lives to make the conference tournament. Every win is such a huge win for them, so you have to deal with that. We talked about it all week and sometimes you need to go through that for kids to understand what you are talking about. I certainly thought they played with a heightened sense of urgency tonight and we couldn't control the energy they had out on the floor particularly early in the game. We had our spurts where finally the urgency fell on us because we got down and we fought ourselves back. But early on in the game we put a lot of fuel on the fire for them by missing point blank lay-ups and letting them get into transition and letting them gain their confidence and they pretty much controlled the energy level of the game for the majority of it."On the Huskies' transition game "They got a ton in transition in the first half for two reasons. One we were missing easy lay-ups and then all of the sudden we go from getting a score and being able to get back in transition, they get a rebound and they were sending guys out early in transition and that really hurt us. Number two we just felt when we were down on the offensive end when we quick shot the basketball because we broke down and did a lot of one on one stuff in the first half. We talked about it in time outs and really thought we did a good job of settling ourselves until the last two minutes of the half where we went right back to one on one. Every time we went into one on one basketball without side middle side or swinging the ball we took quick shots they got the inside rebounding position, they rebounded and flew right down the floor."
