Head Coach Tubby Smith 

Opening Statement

“Before we start, I’d like to give a lot of credit to Army. Their coach, Jim Crews, does an excellent job. We spent time together in Kuwait a couple of summers ago in Operation Hardwood,’ a program for the troops. To play one of the academies was a real thrill. I think we got after it defensively, our guys were really focused and really aggressive, with their active hands and getting deflections. We got some good play from Damian Johnson, who’s been practicing well, I’m real impressed with him. I think we had some opportunities to put more points on the board, we had some good looks and we were over-dribbling when we should have been passing. We were sharing the ball and we got 19 assists. If we could have made more shots, we would have had a lot more assists. We still need to get better in a lot of areas, especially rebounding. I think in the second half we got a little careless with the ball. Lawrence (Westbrook) hadn’t practiced much this week, so he was a little rusty. He’s certainly a guy we have to have ready to play.”

On McKenzie’s struggles

 “We try to teach that it is a team game and you cannot rely on just one guy. I think we have enough athletes on the team where we can pick it up when one guy struggles. They’ve worked hard enough and gone through individual workouts since last April and it’s starting to pay off for some of them. Having Lawrence (McKenzie) is just a real bonus. One guys out and you’re missing his ability, the others step up and pick up the slack. Blake gets better every time he steps on the court and so does Jon Williams. That’s why we play guys, to get them that experience now, so when there is a crunch time they can step up and perform.”

Damian Johnson

“I think everybody played well. We did what we are supposed to do, we focused.  Focused on defense and on offense and as you can see the scoring was spread out. So it is not really one guy that needs to score a lot of points not be a guy to guy, when you have a team like this when you play on team like this that plays this type of defense at this type of pace.”

Lawrence McKenzie

“I don’t think so. The groin is fine. When you have other guys playing well, that is who you go with. Everyone was in and out of there. I don’t think anyone played more than 30 minutes.”

“A lot of people doubted this team as far as being athletic. Coach came in and he saw that. He put faith in guys and you can see that in Damian and Al and the young guys and that helps us. It seems like everyone is catching on quick because guys want to get better every day in practice.”

Dan Coleman

“Coach Smith stresses that a lot in practice...diving on the floor so you don’t get your knees taken out so that motivates us to get on the floor and be scrappy.”