Auburn head coach Steven Pearl met with the media following the 83-73 win over NC State.
Opening statement…
I thank our fans, our students, obviously another sellout. So incredibly grateful for their support, for a late game to show up in those numbers, we're so fortunate to be at Auburn and have a fan base that just continuously shows up, even when the product tonight sucked. So I'm just so, I'm eternally grateful to our fans.
I'll start offensively, 20 turnovers. Our execution has got to get better in order for us to beat the best teams on our schedule. 20 turnovers leads to 22 points.
And as a team that averages 93, they score 22, that's 51 in the half court. So our defense, we'll get to that in a second, answer the bell, but our offense has got to get better. And if it weren't for just tough shot making by KO and Keyshawn Hall, we don't win that game.
So two of our best players bailed us out when we had very poor performances from other guys on our team. So we started off early doing things that we're not supposed to do. We're playing off one foot, we're throwing difficult passes instead of just throwing strikes or singles, for all you baseball fans out there.
We're trying to throw freaking home runs and Hail Marys. And it's just, we can't do that if we want to beat the best teams on our schedule. So we're all very disappointed in how we executed offensively.
20 turnovers, they shoot 20 more shots than us. If you let a team that's top 10 in the country offensively shoot 20 more shots than you, I don't know how the hell we won that game. Our defense really saved us.
But really proud of KO, really stepped up in an environment where we needed him. I think he was a little more juiced up to play against his former teammate, Darrion Williams. I'm just gonna tell KO that he's got a former teammate on every team.
Just to, cuz that was obviously a lead. And then Keyshawn Hall just continues to do what he does offensively, 28 and 10. But the difference is he had six turnovers and KO had zero.
And Keyshawn is the most accountable guy that you can have offensively. He recognized that he made some bad passes, some errant passes. So offensively, we got bailed out by two of our better players.
And then defensively, I'm proud of our effort. They have some really talented offensive players. Copeland, he's such a handful, and when he makes threes, he's a pro. So they did a really good job exposing us, posting us up. But we did a good job on McNeil, did a really good job on Darrion Williams. But I think Holloman and Copeland obviously played well.
So I thought defensively, we did a good job in transition. 56% of their points come in transition, whether that's fast break or then early transition offense. And I'm not sure how much they had tonight, but I would imagine it's not that many.
So I thought our defense did a pretty good job. I thought switching really bothered them. Did a good job in not sending that to the foul line. We got rebounded by 13. So overall, defensively, we can build off that. But offensively, we have a long way to go.
Will Wade was just in here saying they did change up some of their defenses, but he thought that bothered Tahaad. In particular, how much of that kind of them trapping the ball screens up top, do you think affected the guard play?
I was more concerned with them switching. I love when teams impact the ball screen, because anytime you put two people on the ball, there's three guys guarding four on the backside. So just make the easy pass, and then we have them outnumbered.
But instead, we're throwing hook passes when there's three guys in the paint guarding the five man. They knew that we wanted to attack them inside, and they loaded to the ball. But anytime we passed it to the wing and entered it into the post, we got whatever we wanted.
But too many times, we just tried to make the difficult pass, and it led to turnover. So yeah, I mean, they switched up their defense, which is fine. But they switched up their defense to what we've been guarded with all year.
So we've gotta be able to make that adjustment and take advantage of it. So yeah, I would prefer them to guard us the way they did, honestly. I think switching is more bothersome than impacting ball screens.
You said earlier this week that you told KO before the St. John's game, we're gonna beat good teams. You gotta be really good, and he had a career night tonight. Just the progress he's made, cuz he had a couple of really tough ones in Vegas. How proud are you of the way he's really stepped up over these last couple games?
Yeah, I mean, it was so needed too, because we don't beat St. John's or NC State without that step up. And it's good, because Tahaad's not gonna have a great game every night. Elijah's not gonna have a great game every night.
So we need others to step up from other guys on the roster, and KO did that. So really proud of him, I thought he really rose to the moment. And a couple things defensively I'd like for him to get better at. But nine rebounds, I'm sure that's a career high for him. He made all those free throws, and made some really tough shots. And he was just in a rhythm tonight.
So it's good that he has that dimension, that peace, to kinda go out there and make tough shots. So proud of KO, he responded really well to some tough coaching a few games ago, and made the adjustments.
Coach, this is a team that really feeds off of runs and energy, both good and bad. Tonight, the perfect example, a couple 7-0 runs on the plus side, a couple 7-0 runs for NC State as well. How do you kinda balance that out in the emotions of the basketball game, especially coming out of timeouts?
Yeah, I mean, they're a team that really goes in spurts, and we knew that. And it's tough to call timeouts when you're just turning the ball over every possession. So I know Twitter wants me to call more timeouts, but it's really hard to do that when we're just kicking the ball over the gym.
So, we knew that they could go on runs offensively, but they got some real lapses defensively as well. So we wanted to attack that. And we also knew that their best players were gonna play heavy minutes.
So in a 40-minute game, you kinda wanna keep those guys out there to kinda wear them out and get into their legs a little bit. Because late, they missed a lot of shots. And I think us not calling a million timeouts when you have extra long TV timeouts because it's on ESPN. Ultimately, I think that took a toll on them later in the game. So good job by me.
