Here are some comments from John Calipari as his team prepares for a game at Portland and three games in Maui (via UKAthletics.com):
[B]Head Coach John Calipari[/B]
[I]On last night’s SEC games and how the team looks…[/I]
“Well, from what I saw watching all of the games last night, I was getting depressed if I watched more than five minutes of the games. There are some really good teams out there. There are some teams that are playing really well. I was in a dead-sweat watching those teams play last night. I thought South Carolina played really well. Florida played well until the last five minutes, I guess. When I saw that game, it was like basket, basket, basket. Look, this is a hard trip. This is a dangerous game because now (Terrence Jones) thinks he is on vacation. He doesn’t know we are playing a basketball game because he has never done this before. He has already lined up what he is going to do by the minute. He probably hasn’t listed the game at 7:30 on Friday night, so you have that issue. We are on our way to Hawaii to play three teams that are better than us. This is going to be a learning situation for us. We have to figure out what we do, how hard we have to play. Obviously, when school ends (for the Christmas break) we are going to have plenty of time to regroup and see how we play both on defense and offense. But right now, you have to go with what you have; and right now we are the youngest team out there. Whether it’s Portland, or any of the three teams we will play in Maui, we are going to be the youngest. There are going to be things that will happen and I am just going to have to tell them to go make a play. That’s where we are.”
[I]On Terrence Jones returning home…[/I]
“Yeah, he and I talked about that. He came in and I told him that I have never had a player go home and play well, so good luck. I mean, naturally, he is just happy we are going. What I will tell you is for November and being such a young team, we’re okay. We are not awful; we’re okay. But, when I watched all of these teams playing defense, switching, pressing, scoring on out-of-bounds plays, I was like, ‘What?’ We don’t even have those plays in yet. That’s when I turned it off. I just said stop it.”
[I]On what he is concerned about…[/I]
“We have many different issues than we did last year. One is we are not playing as many people. You have a lot of room for error when you play as many guys as we played last year. Last year, if someone was off their game, we could just sit them and we would be fine. We don’t have that luxury this year. The second thing is that we don’t have as big of bodies. So now, you are looking at teams exploiting the post. I look at that and say, ‘How are we going to do that?’ Obviously, we hadn’t worked on that before East Tennessee State. We talked our way through it in the second half. We have really got to figure out what we are going to do and how we are going to do that. We are better in the pick and rolls. How are we going to play the pick and roll? We have got to be a gang-rebounding team. We can’t just have one player gobbling up every ball. We don’t have that yet. It is just them accepting what we are. There is an excitement level that is pretty good. But, again, we are only practicing 10 or 11 guys, and so that makes things tough.”
[I]On (former UK player) Eric Bledsoe’s impressive start in the NBA…[/I]
“I said he would be the surprise of the draft. I have been wrong before. I think it was ’78. It might have been ’77. I coached the kid so I know he has a toughness, fire and a will to win. He is not afraid. He just has to be more confident in himself. We had to convince him that he was good enough. That was all year. We told him that if he just would do what he was doing, he would be fine. You hug him a little bit, and you let him know what you think about him and you stick him out there. He cares about the team. The hardest thing about this is to get a player to trust someone else when they have never had to. Their whole life has been about survival, and where am I going to stay tonight. Now you get that young man to trust everyone and convince him that everything is going to be okay. It’s neat when you have a player in the NBA who is scoring more in the NBA than he scored for you. That is cool. When you score more in the NBA than you did for us, you know you have talent.”
