Everything Lamont Paris said after South Carolina loss to Missouri

South Carolina men’s basketball coach Lamont Paris spoke with the media after a 78-59 loss to the Missouri Tigers on Saturday afternoon.

Here is everything he had to say.

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Opening Statement

“Well, we got off to a pretty slow start and then thought we made a good run, settled down in some areas, and were able to be right where we needed to be at halftime. In the second half, I think around seven minutes and something left, it was still an eight-point game. But as the clock kept ticking, it just seemed like guys got a little more impatient on both sides of the ball.”

“Didn’t make some plays, and so the result ended up the way it was. But I thought to start the second half, it was a combination of a couple of things. We generated some good shots. We didn’t make them. And that was happening at the same time that they would get a couple of offensive rebounds and stuck them back and scored. So again, guys just tend to get a little impatient, and I think that was part of what happened.”

“But the physicality of the game was a big factor. It just was, it seemed that way. I’ll watch the game and see what I really think, ultimately. But it appeared to me just from the physicality, and I’m not saying who does what in the weight room, I’m saying who’s willing to do what physically, they were the aggressors that way, and we were the recipients of their physical play.”

Lamont, another opponent that had kind of a one-sided game on the boards, second chance points, offensive rebounds, that kind of thing, how do you counter when you don’t have a lot of height that gets on the floor, trying to get smaller guys to play more physical?

“That’s a good question. I’ve always believed it’s the size of the fight in the dog versus the size of the dog in the fight, within reason. I don’t know what it looks like to go against Shaquille O’Neal, no matter how much fight I have. I don’t think that is the right recipe, but within reason, and we are within reason. We are within the margin of error in those physical situations, so it’s way less of our size. A couple of them, wingspan, length, but I just look down oftentimes and I see them leaning, pushing, pulling, and we’re being leaned upon, we’re being pushed, and we’re being pulled.”

“Versus also, I just come from a different school. We fight fire with fire, and so I’ll start off trying to do it a certain way, that I think is within the rules, not fouling. But once I see this game is being called this way, and you’re doing that and getting away with it, I bet you we’re both going to be doing the same thing for the entirety of the rest of the game until that changes. It won’t be a one-sided affair, that’s for sure. I think that’s just a mentality. I think that’s a mentality.”

“And so, we speak about it often. We try to do some things that simulate what it looks like to stand up for yourself in those situations. We try a lot. But at the end of the day, the rules of the basketball game are as such, when they miss ultimately you have to rebound the ball. It only ends three ways, a turnover, a made basket, or you get the rebound. And most of the possessions end in a rebound.”

“And again, this is the second game in a row, we had to accept going on the road to a good Texas team and then losing because we gave up 20 second-chance points that shouldn’t have been there. It was 11 in the first half, I went into halftime and told them, I said ‘it’s a great job you did to hold these guys to 23 points in the first half.’ I think they looked and were a little confused. I said ‘yeah, 23 points, guys. 23 you held them to. No, you gave them 11 more on the second chance opportunities, but you held them to 23 points.’ So we were doing things, we were in the right spots, we were getting them to miss tough shots, and at the end of the day you have to finish it off pretty consistently with a defensive rebound.”

Only 31% on offense when it came to shooting today, Coach Gates was in here earlier talking about he felt like you guys might have had some advantages in terms of maybe how they switched things, was there anything that they did defensively that might have given you that trouble, or was it one of those where you got the shots you wanted but they just didn’t go in?

“A little bit of both. I mean, they were switching, and you tend to get discouraged if, ‘ok, here’s something that they’re doing,’ and there’s so many things that are happening in the game, ‘here’s one thing they’re doing, let’s attack this thing with this play, action, whatever it is.’ And then you do that a couple of times and you don’t see a result. Should’ve, probably, but you don’t. Then you get away from that even though that was probably the right concept.”

“But I also think some of it was not finishing plays. We didn’t finish some plays. Thought there was a couple of times that we made strong moves in there and there wasn’t a whistle. So I don’t begrudge those decisions that we made. And then also when we did kick out, like we started the second half, I don’t know what possession it was, it may or may not have been the first possession, but one of the earlier possessions in the second half, Kobe makes an incredible skip pass to the opposite corner, and we’re wide-open in front of our bench, and those have to go in. You get some of those, they have to go in. Because they’re a good defensive team, not by accident.”

“So sometimes you’re going to have to grind and end up taking a tough shot. That happens plenty of times. So when you do generate some good shots, which there were some of those, there were a number of shots that I really liked that we got, and in the second half in particular, just didn’t make them. We just didn’t make them. That was not the whole story, but there were certainly some specific windows that we needed to make a couple of those shots in order for the game to stay right where it needed to be.”

Lamont, you talked about being physical, Kobe and Elijah did too when they were in here. It seems the players know that that’s a big difference here, obviously they don’t want to lose, so they don’t want it do be a big difference here, and like you guys said, you practice it, so where is it do you think, knowing and wanting and practicing is falling short of doing once it gets to the game?

“Yeah, ultimately I think if you’re guided by competitive spirit, a lot of those things end up working their way out, right? There’s some skill to it. There’s some skill to understanding where the rebound’s going to come off. There’s other components to it, but the biggest factor is drive and desire and toughness. Toughness I think is a big part of it. Again, I feel like you’ve moved me.”

“Urgency, I tell our guys all the time, ‘I am so afraid of certain things that that fear directs what my actions are.’ It determines when I come into the office. It determines how hard I work at this. It determines my fear of certain things. As a competitor, I think you need to have a healthy fear. My fear of losing, if I was a player it would be my fear of giving that rebound up because I know what ultimately it means. And that fear has to generate and incite a reaction and a response. It has to, otherwise you’re just deciding that ‘I’ll try to get this rebound,’ and I don’t know that we have a healthy enough fear of what giving up rebounds does to the overall chances of winning the game.”

“It sounds good, you can write it on a piece of paper and say ‘hey, I agree with that, if we give up offensive rebounds, we probably won’t win as much,’ but do you fear? Is there a healthy fear of what that really means, which is going to make you do things that are seemingly supernatural to yourself if that’s not you general disposition as an aggressive defensive rebounder.”

You’ve got two seven-footers sitting on the bench. Is there nothing you can do to get something out of them in these games where you’re outsized and getting beat on the boards so badly?

“Yeah, we practice every day. There are a lot of components to the game of basketball. Not turning the ball over, what kind of offense can we run with you on the floor, who can you defend in terms of staying in front of the ball, mobility, who remembers plays and play sets, who is more likely to respond to something, so many factors.”

“So, certainly I have the guys who I think net out to be, and we still keep pushing buttons, that’s why Jordan Butler went in there some today, it’s why we’re still in February trying to figure some of those things out, from a consistency standpoint. So certainly size is a factor, size is a factor, but I don’t know that our tallest guys would be described by their teammates as our best rebounders. I’m not sure that that would be the description that they would have.”

“So the guys that are more likely to do it, generally speaking, in conjunction with all these other things that have to happen in a game, not turning the ball over, we only turned it over eight times. We also could have turned it over 20 times and given up less rebounds, in theory, less rebounds. So those are the decisions that I have to make, but I’m making those decisions based on the evidence that I see every day at practice.”

“We practice every day. Every day. I see what fight looks like in one guy versus another guy every day. I see what vertical leap looks like in one guy versus another guy. I see what all these things look like in one guy versus another guy. Every single day I see those things. Every single day. From an outward perspective, the thing that you can see every single day is who’s taller than whom, right? So, I get your question. It’s a good question. But ultimately, there’s so many factors, we’re still searching for the most aggressive, physical, willing rebounders to get involved in physical play around the basket.”

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