uneblinstu's Post Game Chatter: Vol 9, Ed 8 - South Dakota

[hhcmatt]

Notes and quotes

Nebraska Postgame Notes

*-Michael Jacobson finished with his first career double-double with 11 points and 10 rebounds. His 10 boards was a season and career best, as he had nine rebounds twice in 2015-16. Jacobson tied his season high for the second straight game with 11 points.

*-The double-double was the Huskers’ third of the season, as Ed Morrow Jr. had two earlier in the year.

*-Jacobson also dished out a career high five assists, topping his previous season and career high of three vs. Sacramento State.

*-Tai Webster nearly missed his first career double-double with 12 points and a career-high nine assists. Webster’s nine assists not only topped his previous career high of seven vs. UCLA on Nov. 24, but also matched the Huskers’ highest individual assist game in Tim Miles’ five seasons (Glynn Watson, nine vs. Rutgers on Feb. 6, 2016)
*-Webster has now been in double figures in all eight of Nebraska’s games this season.

*-Nebraska’s 9 3-pointers were a season-high  (previous high was 8 vs. Mary).
*-Nebraska’s 14-0 run in the first-half was a season-best (previous high was 10 vs. Mary)

*-Freshman Isaiah Roby matched his career high with eight points (also vs. Mary).

*-Nebraska has held seven of its eight opponents under 40 percent shooting, including four under 40 percent.

*-Nebraska’s 19 assists were a season high, topping the previous best of 16 vs. Mary

 

Nebraska Head Coach Tim Miles 
Opening Statement:
“It was a very good game.  I think South Dakota played the way I thought they would.  I knew it would be difficult to separate.  Even at halftime when we were up 14, to me it felt like it was a lot tighter than that.  We knew it would come down to the end, and I was really proud of our guys to perform down the stretch.  I thought, again, South Dakota competed really hard, and really I thought out-competed us the second half for that stretch of time.  When you get punched in the mouth, you can’t look at that and say, ‘Oh gee, what’s going on?  Do I have any teeth left?’  You just gotta swallow them, spit the blood out, and keep battling.”

On what changed in the second half in regards to shooting:
“Well I think their press/zone combination.  Come out, just go man a little bit here and there and it gets your guys on their heels.  When we had that stretch of I don’t know how many minutes where we didn’t get a bucket, right?  At the same time I didn’t think we were doing our job.  When you lose your aggressiveness on zone attack, it really feeds down to how you play defense.  I thought South Dakota was downhill on us for a long time, and of course it cut the lead from whatever to two. Then we made some big shots down the stretch.  We have to firm up our zone attack. I have to do a better job of that.  We need to firm that up.  I thought we did a better job late when we went more of a power game, with two low guys, gave us a chance for a couple offensive rebounds.  Then we made a couple threes.  We’re going to have to make threes. We’re going to have to get guys ready to make threes.  And that’s part of the deal, and I think we will.  This game is kind of what I expected, I thought when we talked on Friday that this is what we talked about, and it’s the way it played out.”

On whether [Freshman center Jordy Tshimanga] was okay:
“Yeah.  We just decided to go small, and you can see why when [South Dakota Senior forward Tyler Flack] hit those shots late in the game.  I was just afraid that [South Dakota head coach Craig Smith] over here was going to do some things.  Quite frankly he had played pretty good for some time early and then kind of faded out a little bit as the half went on.  I just didn’t like the matchup because Flack can make threes and [South Dakota sophomore forward Trey Burch-Manning] can drive really well.  They’re good on the boards.  You get a kid like [South Dakota junior guard Carlton Hurst], who Craig and I recruited back at CSU, and he’s a warrior.  That kid got ten rebounds tonight.  We actually thought when we recruited him he’s more of a three/four type of guy.  In the Mountain West you can kind of get away midsize.  It didn’t surprise me at all that he made a real impact on the game.  It really just changed how we had to play.”

On freshmen players:
“You can’t just drop off and hope that you’re up seven and hang on.  These guys have to at least level things off and young kids just don’t always know how to play hard enough.  Coaches are very critical, when I say critical I mean you have a discerning eye about positioning, about what you allow them to do defensively, and they’re just not used to that.  It becomes a little bit of an overload, but I think as you see development in guys, like a kid like Tai or Glynn, you understand that that’s what you have to do to get those guys to become the players they can.”

On whether or not the Husker players were looking ahead to Creighton:
“No. Look at the way we came out.  Until he [Craig Smith] changed the game schematically, that’s when mentalities changed.  We got a little selfish with some shots, we rushed some stuff up there.  I asked Ed [Morrow], ‘What’d you think?’ He had ten and six.  Michael [Jacobsen] had 11, ten, and five, and they’re hanging their heads like they just lost their puppy dog.  They just felt like they forced shots and didn’t do their job, didn’t rebound enough because we’re even on the boards with South Dakota, and they’re like, ‘We have to do a better job,’ and I thought that that’s a good mentality for them to be in.  But there is no doubt that they know that they had to bring their best tonight to win.  And we take a lot of pride in winning in Pinnacle Bank Arena.  We didn’t win enough last year and we’re trying to make up for that this year.”

Nebraska Player Quotes

On whether sophomore forward Michael Jacobson is mad about the win

“No, I don’t know, I just, I felt like we could’ve - credit to them though, no doubt, because they definitely switched defenses and pressed obviously and did some things that kind of got us on our heels and out of our attack mindset, which I felt like was pretty good at the start of the game and then some things happened. But no, they did a good job and I feel like, yeah, we’ve just got to keep taking it one game at a time because it got to two points there, and, not good.”

 

On whether sophomore forward Ed Morrow thinks the team got energy and 3 pointers going, like Coach Miles had said he wanted from them yesterday

“Yeah I felt like personally we got it going. I feel like we just got a little comfortable, coming back in after the second rotation, you know, those guys actually did a pretty good job. We came in a little comfortable…and it sort of just rolled over into the second half.”

 

On how sophomore forward Ed Morrow thinks the team did rebounding against South Dakota

“I feel like we did a horrible job on the boards today. Based on our match-ups, we came out prepared, we were expecting to do way better than that, and we sort of just let the other team get the best of us on the boards.

 

South Dakota Head Coach Craig Smith

Opening Statement

“I think I learned from somebody really intelligent and generally well-thought out…that you have got to like the taste of your own blood. Thanks for letting me speak with you [Coach Miles} if we would have won, I know it wouldn’t have been like this. First of all I need to thank the University of Nebraska and certainly Coach Miles for letting us play this game. It means so much to our program, we have four guys on our roster that are from Nebraska. [Coach Miles] is a man of his word, I know initially two years ago when we were looking at the position at the University of South Dakota, that’s one thing he brought up. I think he said we were going to play there, but he doesn’t remember that part. Our administration remembers that.

 

“Seriously, it’s all win for us and not much of a game for Coach Miles and Nebraska, and once he says something, he’s going to stick to his word. It means so much to our team and our program and tonight we got better. It looked like Edward Scissorhands out there for the first eight minutes or so. There were a lot of turnovers, we were just driving in there, like playing volleyball kind of throwing it up there and waiting to see what would happen.  It’s different for us, their guys are way bigger, way stronger, the thickness of them, you go in there and we are just bouncing off of them like a pinball, and we had to adjust. Once we finally kind of settled in, I really liked what I saw out of our team. I thought we had great resolve. They’re very, very good…24^th toughest schedule in the country, I’m sure that will be about top 10 in the next week or so. I am proud of how we played when we got down 22 in a hostile environment with such a young team. I was really proud of the way we came back and showed a lot of resolve.

 

On preparing for Nebraska…

“That’s the hardest part is preparation. This is game 10, so 10 games, nine practices and three days off in the last 22 days with 10 newly eligible players in our program. It’s hard to fine tune and tighten up. We will finally now be able to settle in and just get better. Tonight made us better, playing against a very good team, on the road, where if we didn’t figure things out in a hurry, it would have been [a 50-point deficit] very quickly. We don’t play a lot of zone, but we had to just to get them off attack. It’s so hard. I mean Webster, how good is Webster. Webster is playing at such a high level, how many big shots did he hit tonight? He’s just playing with so much swagger right now, and he’s leading them. And you can see that watching film, it was easy to see. And Watson is so electric. Just go back and watch the UCLA game and nobody could stay in front of that guy. It’s hard to emulate that pace and we had to do something to get him slowed down.

 

On USD Triston Simpson..

“We love Triston. Triston is a very endearing point guard. He has got a Magic Johnson type of smile, very personable, plays super hard. He’s averaging over 17 minutes a game, we are playing three true freshman and tonight was the least minutes any of them have played. I love all three of those guys and Triston is just a phenomenal person, he plays a great pace, really knows how to play, rarely does he make the wrong decision. Going into tonight’s game, he had one turnover tonight, but on the year as a point guard playing 17 minutes a game as a true freshman, he’s had six turnovers is all. Our freshmen don’t turn it over. Tyler Peterson has turned it over seven times in 10 games. Triston had one dumb one tonight, tried to throw it to Austin Sparks and he just kind of…. So he has eight now and Brandon Armstrong doesn’t have any.  Those three guys know how to play they have very good feel. The game is going a million miles an hour right now for those guys. Once we started coming back, it was hard to take any of those guys out. We had a good group going, we were really getting downhill, we missed some chipped shots I think at the rim, especially in transition that I think, boy, we would like to have back. But I like this team, I like where we are going, we have a long long way to go, but Triston is going to be a huge part of this program and we are fired up to have him for four years.