Notre Dame basketball coach Micah Shrewsberry spoke following Monday night's win over Long Island University.
Opening statement:
“You play games like this and they test you in different ways, right? Just like the exhibitions test you, these games test you in different ways also. Early in the year, you guys didn't watch or anything. You just come to the game, right? So you're playing Long Island, seems terrible, probably win by a lot. I watch it and I'm like, ‘Oh my God, they switch one through five on and off the ball and we haven't worked on that not one bit.
“If we spend every day doing it, leading into the game, we're gonna be really bad at what we normally do. So sometimes you can't work on it because it's how much better we have to get in what we normally do. How many teams are we gonna see like this? Maybe NC State in February or something. Nobody else is gonna play like this, so it's tricky. How do you prepare for a game? You wanna play well, right?
“I thought we overprepared for how DePaul tried to guard us. I thought we were really robotic at times offensively versus that. This game was about work on ourselves all week. They're gonna do some stuff that's gonna get us, right? Right before shoot around Trey's (Whitted) like, ‘Hey, you wanna talk about, they're out of bounds under and this is the only play or you wanna talk about they're gonna trap this in the corner?’ I'm like, ‘Absolutely not.’
“We turned it over in the corner, right? He's like, ‘Told you.’ I'm like, ‘I know, but I wanna keep working on us.’ I wanna keep working on the things that we see. When we get it on film, this is how we should adapt to this. I was proud of our guys for how we played in stretches. We gotta play longer stretches better, but we responded a couple of times when we played well, we didn't play well and things got close. We responded the right way. That's something to build off of.”
On the maturity of the team to fight through the officials controlling the game and not allowing the game to have a flow:
”Yeah, which is different than the two exhibitions we play. Exhibitions across the country were 60 plus fouls in free throws, right? I watched Loyola and DePaul; they shot 64 free throws in that game. Ours were in the 20s. We weren't quite prepared. We had officials that played an exhibition game for an early season game and how it gets called. Sometimes the best teacher is experience and this is that experience for how the game gets called early.
“It was choppy and I still like you scored 89 points. I didn't think our defense was particularly good in the second half, especially when Davis fouled out. We didn't protect the paint the way that we should. They still scored 67. So we did good things. It's just, you want more of it, right? And we're not peaking on game one.
“We got a lot of time to keep getting better, but there were good things that we did. And like you said, some maturity, we kind of responded to some stuff.”
On no one playing more than 30 minutes and getting 52 points from the bench:
“If we take care of the ball. We might've gotten even more off the bench, right? There's a beauty in and an art to being an off-the-bench gunner, right?
“Sometimes you forget about Cole Certa coming off the bench, right? You can only walk through with five people. You can only walk through so many sets and usually do it with the starters. When he comes in, some assistant coaches standing up, yelling, talking about don't let No. 5 shoot. He's going to do this. He's going to do that. But some do that and walk through it, right?
“He's going to get some looks that maybe Braeden (Shrewsberry) doesn't get, or he might get some looks that now happens with different groups. The one thing I told him after the DePaul game is I got to get you more shots. He took three shots against DePaul.
“Sometimes it's about finding the right lineups and playing them with the right guys where he can get more shots. You got him, you got Ryder (Frost). Those guys, when they're open and they shoot it, I feel like it's going in. Whether it does or whether it doesn't, I feel like it's going in and it gives you such a threat to have those guys. Now you're worried about a lot of different things. Sometimes those guys slip your mind. Next thing you know, they got 37.”
On Carson Towt’s 19 rebounds:
“It's just energy personified. That's what I just said on the radio. I said it down in Charlotte media day. There have been a bunch of players who have transferred up recently. A lot of scorers. A lot of those scores don't usually match their scoring production at a higher level. Rebounding translates at every single level.
“I'm a good rebounder in middle school. I'm going to go to varsity. I'm going to go rebound. If I can rebound in high school, I usually rebound in college. If I can rebound in college, I usually rebound in the NBA, right? Like I keep saying it.
“Ben Wallace played Division II, right? Virginia Union. What'd he do at Virginia Union? He went and got that ball. What'd he do in the NBA? He went and got that ball off the glass. It is heart. It is effort. That's what he does. That's what he brings to us. He was struggling a little bit because he played 28 minutes. I told him to quit fouling in the exhibitions so he could get his wind up.”
On what Towt’s rebounding does for the offense:
“We want to get a chance to push it. We want to get a chance to play faster off those rebounds. I didn't think we did a great job when he went out, when we subbed early on, like their guards got a bunch of rebounds. We have to clean that up. But when he can get it now, Markus(Burton) and Jalen (Haralson), those guys are getting those outlets and pushing it with pace. He rebounds it, and then he's sprinting to get to the rim right after that. I think just cleaning up, right? Our two bookends defensively is our transition defense and our defensive rebounding. When you got a guy who can go and get it for you like that, it really cleans up how good of a defensive team you can be.”
On if he ran plays for Certa and Frost or if guys found them with the ball:
“A little bit of all the above, right? We ran a couple of plays to get them - actually, I think Cole missed one of the things we ran for him. You want to find those guys in different ways. Like I said, they switched, so they take you out a lot of your offense. A lot of the stuff they were getting was created from some of the other guys driving, the help, right? Now they switch.
“They might have a big guy that's guarding Markus. Now he's able to attack and get by. Now here they go swarming to the ball and we're getting some of those kickouts. A little bit of everything. When you have shooting on the floor, it opens up everything for everybody else. So that's why you recruit shooting.”
On playing 11 guys in the first half and if it was a concerted effort to play deeper into his bench:
“You want to. I think we have 11 guys that are capable. Sometimes in practice, people separate. There hasn't been much separation in practice. One day, Brady Koehler plays great. The next day, Ryder comes back and plays great. Or Garrett (Sundra) plays great. One day it's Cole, one day it's Brady. There's been days where it's Markus and one day it's Logan (Imes).
“Logan's team won in the fall way more than Markus’ team did, right? You've got so many guys that nobody's really separated themselves to say, ‘I'm doing this and this is my spot.’ I think as we keep trying, we keep mixing. There's options now, right?
“If you're not going, I can go to somebody else and it's OK. Cheer for your teammate because it's his night and it's maybe not mine, but I can come back the next night and say, maybe it's that guy's turn too. Having depth, having options is good. We're going to keep trying to press the right buttons to find the right people and the right combos.”
On Jalen Haralson leaving the game in the second half:
“He got stitches. He got hit in the eye. It might have been the very first play, right? The post move and the guy came down, so he was bleeding up here. He had to go get stitches for that. It's hard as a freshman. It's your first game, you're so excited. Like, and then something like that happens, you feel bad for him, but he'll be ready to go. He'll be fired up for the next one.”
On priorities when facing a scrappy team like LIU:
“We talk about our ball handling. It didn't show up because we had 19 turnovers, but we really worked on a lot of pressure-release type stuff. We got to keep going back to it. I think we did a very good job in our pressure release when they're trying to pressure, when they're trying to take away some of our passes. That'll be on the docket on Wednesday.
“It's still us. It's still about us, and other people are going to get up and try and pressure like that at different times. We’ve got to get cleaner in what we're doing there, but that's a lot to it. We talk about winning the possession game. We were plus two in the first half, but just at a quick glance here, we are even on field goals. We are minus one on free throws. The turnovers is the thing that kills us.
“We can score. We can really score a ball. We need more possessions than the other teams, right? We were only plus two possessions. We were up 15. I was like, imagine if we were plus six or plus seven in possessions, what we could be doing offensively. That's something that we're going to keep harping on is our offensive rebounding and our turnovers, so we can win the possession battle every game.”
On what Towt’s physicality and toughness bring to the team:
“A big part of it for us is really just closing down the paint, protecting the paint, and he can help do that in a lot of different ways, whether it's his mobility out there hedging and his effort to sprint back and recover and protect the rim in that way so guys don't have to hold their tags as long, just things like that, and then walling people up in the paint.
“He's quick to go double when the ball gets in the paint. Defense is about effort and physicality. When you get effort and physicality, you usually have a pretty good defense. When you don't get effort and physicality, you usually don't have a very good defense, so it helps to have a guy that gives you effort and physicality.”
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