Mike Brey Notebook | Radford Loss
Notre Dame head coach Mike Brey spoke following the 63-60 loss to Radford at Purcell Pavilion on Wednesday night.
On the loss:
“I’ve been worried about this one for about four days because they’re old and good. They’re way better than us right now. I tip my hat to Radford. They made all the tough plays. We have a hard time finding an offensive rhythm with our group.
“We have a long way to go, which we knew. A lot of respect to Radford. Their old guys were old, and our young guys were young. They tried. They got game situation experience. A lot of new guys doing new stuff.
“We have to get back to work. Everyone can beat us. That’s who we are right now. We’ll keep trying to help these guys a little bit.”
On it being too early for the team to make tough plays in end of game situations:
“I’m looking out there, and Prentiss Hubb goes and makes a drive. He had never done that before in crunch time. I’m glad he tried it. Robby Carmody tries to make a play. He had never had game pressure on him in a real game. He was trying to do it.”
On only taking just 10 free throws:
“We couldn’t get to the line tonight. We’re going to have to get to the foul line. You have to give them credit because they are a pretty good defensive team. We couldn’t get in there as much. The foul line will be important for us to make up the difference of not being efficient from the field.”
On John Mooney’s career night:
“What’s overshadowed was John was really good. He played really well. We want to build on that a little bit. “
On not playing DJ Harvey and Nate Laszewski down the stretch:
“I’m searching. There’s no question. We had a lineup that was alert defensively to get us a couple stops. I thought we would roll with that group. In hindsight, DJ and Nate - Nate didn’t have as good of a night as he had in the early games. He was playing against some men tonight. They were banging the backboard, driving to the paint and it was different. It’s what I expected and worried about.”
On rebounding:
“We went smaller to start the second half to help ourselves offensively. We didn’t rebound very well, so we changed that up a little bit. The whole downshifting thing, you’re giving up some meat on the backboard to see if you can get on an offensive run, but we couldn’t. It didn’t help us either.”
On benefiting from losing a close game:
“I think it’s going to happen a lot. I think that’s who we are. I went in eyes wide open. It’d be great to bounce back to see if we can get a win. It’s interesting for a younger group to be thrown into this to see if we can bounce back and win a game on Saturday.
“I told them it’s a long road. We’re all in it together and let's hang on. We’ll come back in tomorrow and see if we can help them figure it out. Hopefully, we’ll grow from it.”
On TJ Gibbs potentially pressing with his shot not falling:
“He probably is. He’s been a little weight of the world on him. It’s one of the reasons I played Prentiss more. It kind of loosens him up, and he can come off to be the next driver. We have to try to help him to see if he can play through some stuff.
“He’s a good bounce-back guy. We’re going to be in bounce-back mode a lot.”
On getting better looks closer to the rim:
“We have a hard time scoring in the post. That’s just hard for us right now. We don’t have a post scorer. John had some good footwork tonight. We still have to throw it in there and see if he can do some things.
“Our post stuff is more driving and getting fouled or getting layups, which we’ve done in some of our early games, but we couldn’t do it tonight.”