Notre Dame basketball coach Micah Shrewsberry spoke following Friday night’s 69-62 exhibition loss to DePaul.
Opening statement:
“This is why you play these teams to help you lean into the season. They're both so different than how we play defensively. You go against something every day and you get used to it. Now you gotta see something different. DePaul is even different than Butler. Trying to attack it - you have a scout team or you have some managers or you have people kind of running offense or how they're guarding you. But it's different than doing it live, right? So sometimes it takes a minute to click in and you kind of do it to the best that you can. Sometimes you need to see it. You need to get out there and you need to feel it.
“There was some stuff Butler did that really slowed us down and DePaul did something similar, but then other parts of it were different. I didn't think we improved in the area that we worked on, where we saw against Butler and DePaul. We needed to get better in that area, right? So now you got nine days to go do it, right? You really know like, OK, here's an area we got to hit here in the next nine days for us to be pretty good. I told our guys the areas for us to improve.
“One, I didn't think we started well and I was like, hey, I'll take ownership on that because maybe we're doing too much, right? Right now, even shootaround is like practice. It's a little bit harder because all these days we got to get something out of it. Maybe we went too hard at shootaround and we didn't have enough legs to be fresh or play at the right pace at the start.
“I talked about that with our guys. Late game, I was like, hey, I should have just kept it simple, side out of bounds with what we needed. Something that we always run, something we're comfortable with. But we also haven't practiced it. We haven't been in those situations a lot. So that's something to improve. I got to improve for those guys because winning games late is going to be important for us.”
On balancing the good from the Butler game and the bad from the DePaul showing:
“I thought we needed these situations late because we had them at Butler, but we didn’t have our main guys, right? We got situations in, but these were different, right? These were like pressure-packed moments. I got to get a stop. I got to get a rebound. We might get in transition. There's an out of bounds underneath, like all these things happened that you try and manufacture as much as you can in practice that we need to get better at. So this was good for us in that area.
“We didn't shoot the ball well, right? Obviously, we're speaking in honest terms here, but there's going to be nights where that happens. But 6-for-21 is not usually who we are and we got some open looks. I felt like when the ball didn't go in, we kind of got our heads down early on instead of just gritting our teeth and getting stops when we needed to.
“I think both games were helpful because there's going to be a game where we're going to have a lead like at Butler. People are going to come back and then we get a lead. We're also going to have games where people are going to jump on us and we got to come back. You get all these situations at once. So it's this has been really helpful.
On conversations with Markus Burton to flush his frustrations when he starts cold:
“That's part of it. I talked to all of those guys in the locker room. I just told him, we have freshmen and sophomores who are going to play, but they're also going to be up and down at times. There's no consistent freshman or sophomore. We need our older guys to play better and there's going to be nights where they're not going to play better. We need our older guys to be mature. If we want to be really good, Kebba (Njie), Carson (Towt), Braeden (Shrewsberry), Logan (Imes), Markus have to play maturely.
“I think they were they were all up and down. That's what I told them. That was the difference, right? I thought their older guys played came and did something right. I don't want to like tell Chris Holtmann’s business, but like NJ Benson and CJ Gunn are starters who did not start, so a message was sent, right? They were going to play well. We need our guys to play maturely. That was the difference in the game. I thought their older guys played well, and I think our older guys didn’t.”
On finishing 5-of-18 on layups:
“You just got to finish them. I don't know. You're getting there. You're getting opportunities. You got to make them, right? Sometimes that’s a difference in the game, too. It's miss or make. Shot goes in, it doesn't go in.
“We got to the free throw line. We got on the offensive glass. We didn't turn it over a crazy amount of times. Sometimes it's just about concentration. You're getting in there. Got to finish. Got to concentrate through contact. You got to finish every opportunity or sometimes maybe you just got to play off two feet and shot fake somebody and get fouled and get you a couple free throws.”
On Sir Mohammed’s strong exhibition season:
“We need it. He's playing with great energy. Kudos to him for getting himself ready. I thought after the season, he worked really hard in the spring and had a good spring. He transformed his body in the summer and now into the fall. He's playing with more energy. He's playing quicker. He's reacting to different things. He's getting to the rim. He's doing really good things, right? We have to keep him playing at this level and then we have to get some other guys up to that level with him.”
On Notre Dame’s defense following two exhibition games:
“We didn't start well. They had a great game plan for how they were attacking us. We went to something middle of the first half that tried to take away what they were doing. We got better defensively, I thought, when that happened and it’s something we haven't worked on a lot.
“To see us do something we haven't worked on a lot and then put it in the live action versus another team and have some pretty good success, I was pretty happy with that.
“I thought we gave them a couple opportunities at the rim where we weren't physical enough, where they got the ball in the paint right at the rim. We didn't come over and just crack somebody. That's something where I think we have to get better at.
“We didn't play our best. I thought they got us in transition early in the second half. We have to improve our transition defense, be more physical at the rim. They scored 69 points. I thought we guarded at a pretty good level.”
On if a home/away exhibition is how he sees Notre Dame doing the offseason moving forward and if they could add more exhibitions:
“There's been talk about it, right? It helps you, right? We used to do the secret scrimmages and you can kind of manufacture different things. But you could play, hey, we're going to do the secret scrimmage because we're going to get to play 10 extra minutes at the end or five extra minutes.
“Inevitably, Xavier is who we used to play. Xavier used to show up and Sean Miller would call me and be like, Hey, two of my big guys are hurt. We're not going to play that 10 minutes. I'm like, yeah, because we don't have enough bodies either. A game like this is what you kind of need.
“So there is talk of more, right? Like doing more. I'm for it because we practice a lot. I think Steve Forbes tweeted it right before we played Butler. We played Butler October 17th. We used to start practice October 15th, right? We're playing Butler and that would have been day three of practice. We've been practicing all summer, all fall. These guys are tired of seeing each other. Let's add another one to just get another look.
“It's helpful for everybody. I think everybody needs it. It's hard to, it's hard to practice. We have 14 guys. Our guards do not get a break in practice. There's six of them and they play the entire time. So it's like, how much do you play? You need to practice, but also you got to keep them fresh to be able to play the right way in games.
“We got nine days. Now we can taper back a little bit with what we're doing, we got to get sharper, but we got to get our legs to where they need to be to be sharp on day one. We're going to play these exhibitions like this. It's two of them. You get rolling because you get a test, right?
“We play at Ohio State's our first road game. Playing at Butler is a great test for that. Doing your whole how you travel, how you stay, how you do shootaround. You should be ready for your first road test. And now playing DePaul, you're playing at home. You get your home routine down and everything else. I think this is going to be the way of the future.
“You can play your friends and it's OK, right? We can lose this game. I know there are things I need to do to get better in our team, but I'm OK. I'm going to shake hands with Chris Holtmann. I'm going to watch the film and then I'm going to call him on Monday and we're going to talk about what they did and we're going to talk about what we did. We're going to help each other get better. That's why you play people you're like pretty close with because now they can talk about what they see.”
On if Purdue could be a future exhibition game:
“Maybe. They have only played road games, really. We'll see if they change it. They've played on the road, all of those. They've kept playing smaller schools. I think they play UIndy this week or whenever their second one is. So they've only played the one, but I could see it. (Matt) Painter and I will talk in the future probably.”
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