Jan. 14, 2012

Recap | Box Score | Notes | Photo Gallery

Notre Dame Head Coach Mike Brey

Opening Statement…
“We lost to a heck of a basketball team today. I give a lot of credit to Connecticut. Defensively, it was hard for us to do anything. It was hard for us offensively to do anything against their defense. First half, we had some open stuff, layups, free throws right before half. If you’re going to beat them, you’ve got to get them and have a little more breathing time at halftime. Second half, we got looks, but they were kind of hurried, and they were hurried because of their length. Guys beat us up on the backboard at times. They were hard to keep off the board. We were trying, we kept fighting, but not today, and you can’t spend too much time on it because you’ve got a game coming up on Monday night.”

On facing talent like that of Connecticut…
“I thought with Boatwright down, Napier and Lamb felt really aggressive to make plays, and made big plays. Sometimes when the bench shortens a little bit, guys play a little longer, and they get into a rhythm. They’re really talented. We’re going to have to play them again. Certainly, they’ve got great size and length …
I think guarding them physically, especially our front line guys, was so exhausting, I don’t know if we had much left offensively on the other end.”

On the 29-game home winning streak that was snapped today …
“Pretty good run. It’s amazing when you think about that. We’ve been comfortable playing here, and our crowd was great today. Our crowd gave us every opportunity. So, you get a chance to start another streak, and of course the team you get to try to start it against I heard is pretty good (No. 1 Syracuse). Somebody said they were pretty good, I heard that. I’m really proud of our consistency here, our overall body of work at home. Connecticut was really excited to snap our streak. Their program, for all they’ve done. I’m very proud of that. They were really wanting to do that, and there’s a program that’s won national championships, so we’ll see if we can get that streak going again.”

On Scott Martin and his confidence…
“I think it’s a little better lately. I think there was some doubt previous to the Louisville game. I think he’s been pretty darn aggressive and taking shots. But we want him to shoot. We’re running some stuff. We ran an early set for him to get a 15 footer. We ran the first play of the second half, we ran a set to get him a baseline shot, they defended it. He’s going to need to score for us. He’s going to need to take shots. I think he’s feeling better about his game than he was previous to Louisville, even though we lost this one, I want to keep riding his pretty good frame of mind. What he had to do defensively against that physicality, for

forty minutes, that was an unbelievable workout. If anybody deserves a day off tomorrow, it’s him.”

Notre Dame Player Quotes

Jack Cooley – Jr. – Forward

On the team’s inability to score after bringing the game within four points…
“Usually our defense feeds into our offense. At that point in the game we needed to get a stop to keep it going, and we didn’t seem to get a stop there. And then we just weren’t hitting shots.”

On UConn’s defense…
“They’re a really good defensive team. They’re really rough out there. They played really good defense just like every BIG EAST team plays really good defense. We just couldn’t seem to score enough. We just needed to calm down a little bit and be a little more relaxed.

On UConn’s size…
“It was hard to score in the paint, at least, I couldn’t get anything going. We just weren’t really finishing well, weren’t hitting outside shots, and that’s how you beat a team. They just collapsed, so we needed to hit outside shots, and we weren’t hitting anything today.”

On the game’s role as a litmus test for Notre Dame as a team…
“We didn’t shoot well, so this would have been a good litmus test, but when you’re shooting 32 percent, it’s hard to tell anything when you’re not shoot well. It wasn’t like we were missing contested shots, we were missing open shots, and we just couldn’t get anything going down low. We missed some easy ones in the first half that we should have hit, and we just couldn’t get stops on defense.”

On what was learned from today’s game…
“We just need to learn some of the things that they do defensively [for the next time we play them] so that we can score against them. We played well defensively, probably well enough to win the game. So we just need to remember some of the things that they do defensively, so we can work on it in practice and score against them.”

On the game Monday against Rutgers…
“That’s the thing about the BIG EAST, you’ve got to be ready the very next day to play and get a big win. It’s always good when you lose a game to get a quick turnaround and start another winning streak.”

On UConn’s dominant inside game…
“It’s tough when you play against guys who are athletic like that and who can rebound and block shots. UConn has two of them. It’s really tough to get to the basket, not knocking down shots, it’s really hard to score. I think [the inside game] was taken away from us a little bit. We got some penetration, but when the big guys stepped up, everybody kicked the ball out, and we just weren’t knocking down shots.”

Scott Martin – Sr. – Forward

On the end of the home winning streak…
“We’re thankful to be part of that as a group. It was a great streak, but all good things must come to an end. We just need to move on. Thankfully we have a very quick turnaround and get to go play against Rutgers. They are a very good team that’s playing very well right now. We’re also excited to play later in the day. I think that will help.”

On getting out of his scoring “funk”…
“You know, sometimes they just don’t go in. You have to keep the mentality that it is going to go in every time you shoot. You have to have confidence in yourself. My teammates have confidence in me to shoot it. In fact, I got yelled at once when I didn’t shoot it. You just need to keep going after it, and you need to keep shooting and just know they are going to fall.”

On the quick turnaround after today’s loss…
“I think [a quick turnaround] helps a lot. It allows you to kind of get your energy back, to get that hunger back. You kind of get to go out there and play off some of the frustration that came from last game. You definitely can’t sit around and think about [the loss] for too long, which is great. You can move on and prepare for a very good Rutgers team.”

On Scott Martin’s difficulties with hitting shots…
“It is very tough to see one of your best players get open looks and not hit them, but we just keep telling him to keep shooting. That’s all you can do. If you keep getting those looks, you have to take [the shot], and eventually they are going to fall, but we have to bounce back from this now.”

On his role as tri-captain…
“I think I’m just a voice on the court. I feel like I’m just an extension of coach on the court, calling the plays, letting everybody know where they’re supposed to be. That’s the main part. Even though Tim [Abromaitis] wasn’t the loudest guy, he really helped us in that department, so I think I really filled in for him there.”

On the quick turnaround in playing Rutgers on Monday…
“It’s very important. Losses do stay in your mind for a little bit, so this quick turnaround is really good for us. Hopefully we can get a win and get this thing rolling again.”

UConn Head Coach Jim Calhoun

Opening Statement …
“Obviously it was a little bit of unusual circumstances, being told last night (about Boatright). We didn’t have a lot of time to practice, it was seven o-clock at night, but the bottom line is that we know Ryan was with us and his spirit was felt by the team in the locker room. But more important, because he’s an integral part of what we do, and as much as we miss him, I’m proud of what we did. We broke a 29-game home win streak. I’m proud of what we did against Notre Dame, it’s a great university. It’s one of the great universities in America, both academically and athletically. I’m proud because we beat Mike Brey, who has probably evolved into what I think is as good of a coach as there is. And I thought that this year, with the loss of Abromaitis, they just weren’t going to recover. And I’ve watched them recover, and really make themselves into a good team. I’ve watched Cooley struggle at times, and tonight he struggled because he played against a guy who’s going to make a ton of money someday, that being Andre Drummond. And I’m proud for them, for Roscoe Smith and Niels Giffey. The two guys who haven’t been used quite as much making big plays when they get the chance. When you’re a coach, I think that’s the biggest question you have in your team is how will they respond? And I thought we responded great. I thought in the first half, they made a lot of tough 3’s, and in the second half they didn’t. They couldn’t get to the rim. They were not going to get 3’s. I thought we did a very good job of getting into the lane, between Alex (Oriakhi) and Andre (Drummond), preventing them from getting to where they wanted to be. I think it was our quickness in the end. It was very important to us. Niels [Giffey] had a really good defensive effort, and he did a very nice job in the second half. Bottom line, that’s a win that later on down the line, we can point to. We are fortunate enough to have won two road games now, and once again I’ll go home with a great sense of pride about what my team did.”

On being defending National Champions…
“The more that we can convince this group that last year’s National Championship team was last year’s, not this year’s. We’re not defending anything. We received the trophies already. They’re back in Storrs. We’re this year’s team. And what they need is to have each other’s back, and today I think they had each other’s backs.”

On shutting down an opponent’s three-point shooters in the second half…
“We did a good enough job of not letting the passes be that free. I thought we closed that out pretty well. Obviously we’ve worked really hard on defense the past few days, with really good practices, and the entire team today came out full strength.”

On playing a game at 11 am…
“You need to be ready for that 11 o’clock. I don’t remember the last time I had a 6:50am wake up call for a basketball game. We were here a quarter to nine. It was the first time I had ever been here and there was no one here to greet us. That sounds negative, but it’s not. It’s always like “Welcome to Notre Dame” and no one was here. But we were here ready to go.”

UConn Player Quotes

Alex Oriakhi, Jr. – Forward

On Notre Dame’s home winning streak…
“It really wasn’t what we were looking forward to. We just wanted to win the game. Our defense helped in the second half and they weren’t able to get as many open looks.”

On Notre Dame trying to slow the game down …
“That is their (Notre Dame) tempo. We are a team that likes to push the ball and get to the rim as much as possible. That is what we were able to do. When they tried to slow it down we just put pressure on them and they weren’t able to get comfortable.”

Roscoe Smith, So. – Forward

On the win…
“It felt really good. We definitely needed that game. Another BIG EAST win on the road. It was kind of tough, but we pulled through in the second half.”

On being held scoreless the last four games…
“I’ve been up and down the past four games. At halftime we got together and we said, `We’re going to stop them from scoring’ and that’s what we did. We had seven straight stops and relied on our defense to create our offense.”

On grabbing offensive rebounds…
“I give credit to my strength coach and I just got in great position.”

On the UConn bench…
“I thought it was a big game for everybody on the bench. The bench drove us with the spirit and energy and they kept us pushing. We dedicated the game to Ryan Boatwright and he kept on cheering for us.”