Larranaga: "I’m Very Impressed With The NC State Wolfpack"
Miami Head Coach Jim Larranaga met with the media after his team's 86-81 win over NC State in PNC Arena.
Opening Statement...
I’m very impressed with the NC State Wolfpack. Their wins at home are impressive, averaging 90 points a game at home. They beat Clemson, who we lost to, Duke, who we lost to. They beat Wake Forest the other night. They’ve got a lot of guys, five guys, averaging double figures. They’ve got a guy like Yurtseven who had 28 today. They had four guys in double figures, but we had 26 assists, which means we were really sharing the ball well.
I wish coaching was that easy because on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, my coaches kept emphasizing to our players, "We need more assists. We need more assists. This is how you get them."
The players listened and executed, and I thought it was very symbolic that in the first five or six possessions, we probably had four or five assists. I think it sent a message that that’s the way we were going to play today. We scored 86 points and shared the ball very well.
On shooting so well from behind the arc today...
We had a meeting with our three veteran guards and talked all about that, that we’ll shoot the ball so much better if guys are getting touches. It’s one thing if you go three or four minutes and haven’t touched the ball, and then all of the sudden, you get the ball for the first time in awhile.
There’s a little anxiousness, and you might take a bad shot, a contested shot, a rushed shot. We didn’t want that. We established a pattern in practice of really moving the basketball and getting everybody a touch before we shot it. We didn’t do it all the time, but we did it enough to get 26 assists and only 10 turnovers.
On his comfort level with the team’s tempo level...
I’m more comfortable with this than what I’ve been seeing. The talent that we have is more suited for an open-court game than it is a prize fight, a football game in the paint. When you create an open-court game, which NC State really does, they create it with their defense. We don’t do that, so we’ve got to rely heavily on the opponent playing an open-court game so the two teams are going back at each other.
I thought there was some great end-to-end action. We scored, and they scored like three seconds later. Then we threw a baseball pass one time after they scored, and then we threw it the length of the court a shot later.
That kind of end-to-end action is how we would prefer to play, but you need the other team to agree to it because when you play against a team, use Virginia as an example, there aren’t going to be a lot of fast breaks. There isn’t going to be a lot of open court play. You’ve got to be very good at the half-court level.
Today, it was NC State and Miami playing the same style. That’s why the game was so close and such great end-to-end action. I don’t know how many off the top of my head, I know it’s at least four, where we fouled them, and we still made the shot. That’s not good for us because we’re trying to keep people off the foul line. We want to get to the foul line 18 to 20 times. We only got there 12, but we want to keep people under 15 free throws a game. They got 16, and a lot of those were three-point plays, so it wasn’t just the free throw. They already had the bucket, so if they had missed those six, that would’ve been six additional free throws, which we can’t afford.
On Chris Lykes’ production in the starting lineup...
There’s a number of reasons we put Chris in there. The first is he had been playing very well.
The second is Lonnie Walker did not practice yesterday. We didn’t know if he was going to play today. We didn’t know until tip-off time when I turned to our trainer and said, ‘Can I count on him?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, he feels loose.’ His back had tightened up overnight on Friday night to Saturday’s practice. He couldn’t bend at all. He couldn’t touch his knees. Forget about touching his toes. He couldn’t touch his knees on Saturday.
So we were very fortunate because Lonnie really helped us. He was 4-for-7 from the field, 2-for-2 from the foul line, 12 points. He played 30 minutes. I didn’t realize I played him that much. Chris Lykes was very good with six points, five assists in 22 minutes.
On whether the high shooting percentage was a product of the team’s ball movement...
There are several things about shooting.
One, everybody needs to share the ball. Two, you have to find the open man. Three, the guy had to be able to make the open shot. If you throw it to a guy that can’t shoot, it doesn’t matter that he’s open if he can’t make the shot, so you tell that guy not to shoot. Throw it to somebody who can shoot.
We’re looking at five different categories and really emphasizing five categories of assists. There’s a regular assist, which we had 26. There’s a hockey assist where you make the extra pass. There’s the assist where we get fouled. It doesn’t count as an assist in the stat sheet because you got fouled and the ball didn’t go in, so you didn’t get the bucket, but you’ve got to go to the foul line. There’s the attempted assist, where you threw the ball to the right guy at the right time, and it was the right shot, but he just happened to miss. And the last one is you get an offensive rebound and kick it out for a shot.
Those are the five categories we’re looking to improve in. Today, some categories maybe we didn’t do so well in, but the main one, assists, we did great in.