Ross Hodge press conference summary: 2-17
West Virginia head coach Ross Hodge addressed the media ahead of the match up with Utah and WVSports.com provides a summary of what was said.
–Hodge is looking forward to being back in Hope Coliseum tomorrow night. An 8:30 p.m. tip-off is tough for fans so trying to get some more students in there. They have a very talented Utah team coming in that is playing some of their best basketball of the year. The Utes have two dynamic scorers and it will be a big challenge.
–Hodge said that one thing they write on the board before every game is stay together for 40-minutes. There is going to be ebbs and flows but his team does a good job of staying together in those moments and there is no panic in the group. There is a level of confidence they can get the stops and make the plays necessary to get back into games.
–Hodge said he doesn’t agree with the phrase that once you get to a certain point in the season your team is what it is. If you had the good fortune of having a veteran group that you’ve had for two or three years maybe, but when you’re putting a new group together you’re always having the ability to improve a little bit whether that’s him finding ways to put them in positions to be successful or the individual players continuing to improve. That will be their focus until the buzzer goes off in the last game of the year.
–Hodge said there is certainly a freshness component even though they’ve been at it for a long time. All of these guys are experiencing the Big 12 for the first time and there lot of challenges with that. His team enjoys practices, enjoys film sessions and enjoy trying to get better.
—Jasper Floyd made big shots and he’s done that throughout his career in certain moments. He gives you another punch and those opportunities are there for him and he made some big shots.
–Hodge said they were watching the film and saw where Floyd and Treysen Eaglestaff could be more decisive and attack. And also how he could manipulate the defensive principles to allow them to do that. It’s the constant growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset. You have to be more open to learning and failing in some instances and growing from that and trying to get better.
–Utah’s guards are extremely dynamic. Terrence Brown and Don McHenry are dynamic scorers and Keanu Dawes wasn’t shooting the ball great earlier in the year but now he’s making a lot of threes from that combo forward spot. They have gotten better even if their record doesn’t reflect it. That’s where the challenge lies because you have two of the best shot makers, scorers in the league and you can’t allow them to get comfortable.
–Hodge said that on offense they didn’t really give themselves a chance for stretches against UCF but then they didn’t turn the ball over but once for 15-minutes. If you make mistakes good teams can make you pay.
–Hodge said that his team is similar in a lot of ways but experience would be the big difference and the comfort level of his team being together and having vast experiences compared to the start of the year. Hodge said that the catalog of experience and learning is much higher.
–Hodge said you’re always adding wrinkles even if it’s just a way to get a basket but you have your core identity of things that you like to run. Hodge said you have to give the team a lot of credit and their belief in what they were asking them to do. They didn’t have the success you would have liked early, but they kept believing and this group loves basketball. And love being around other people and usually if you have those two combinations of things you can get better but it’s about how much better can you get?
–Hodge said in the Big 12 you better have a baseline physicality and you better have an ability to defend night in and night out because those are the teams at the top. Aside from the talent, it’s the physicality, ability to defend and give yourself chances to win games night in and night out.
–Hodge believes his style of play fits this league and you can’t be married to a style of play because there is so much turnover in this era. And how you go about those core pillars matters.
—Phil Forte runs the baseline out of bounds plays, calls them and implements them.
–It can add pressure to be in this position but you want to be playing meaningful games in March. To feel pressure is a privilege and that anxiety you feel is something that a lot of people will never get to feel. To be in meaningful moments and games. You have to be appreciative of these situations.
–Hodge said the trick is boring and coach speak but you have to stay even keel with your approach. The roller coaster of emotions of a win to a loss and you have to try your best to not go on that roller coaster. The coaches tell the team what’s the next right thing.
–Forte got an incredible standing ovation when he went back to Oklahoma State in the NIT.
–The disappointing losses at Clemson and Ohio State where you had opportunities to win and playing your rival for the first time and beating them. That’s what he loves and appreciates about this team is their ability to stay together and they’ve never blamed anybody and gotten better.
–You don’t want to give Utah second and third chances to score because they create offensive rebounding opportunities with their ability to drive the ball.
–Hodge doesn’t go over what the games mean to the team and his team doesn’t need him to tell them what’s at stake down the stretch. The things you want will be there in the end if you take care of business. Everybody else wants to talk about that instead of what’s right there in front of you.
–Hodge felt like from a game plan discipline standpoint the second half of the Kansas game they did what they were trying to do. But not necessarily a play or moment that he thought was incredible on defense this season.
—Harlan Obioha was a +16 against UCF and he’s become very good, borderline elite in his defensive ball screen coverages. His ability to communicate the coverage, be level, play both and get a couple deflections and he thinks that’s why you saw the impact on winning. Obioha has worked really hard and the center is the middle linebacker of the defense and his ability to communicate quickly with what’s happening and process and execute it, it allows the defense to be as effective as it’s been.
–Obioha’s feel and timing of being level at the screen and staying level with the guard and being able to recover. Just being able to process the information quickly. His ability to process the information quickly and execute it and simply because he is such a large human being to constantly be in front of the ball.
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