Everything Lamont Paris said after South Carolina's loss to Alabama

South Carolina men’s basketball coach Lamont Paris spoke with the 107.5 The Game after an 89-75 loss to the Alabama Crimson Tide on Saturday night.

Here is everything he had to say.

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Really felt like the energy level coming off the week after a tough one against Missouri, you had to be, I would think, pretty encouraged by what you saw in that regard, do you think?

“Yeah, for sure, I thought I was really happy with that. And particularly because we got down. And when we got down there was one little stretch, wasn’t that long, but just looking at faces, they looked a little long. Guys wear their emotions on their sleeves. And so, as you’re trying to rally them back up, I thought we did a really good job of making a couple of plays, realizing where we were, and what are opportunities still were, and then we fought and made plays. We fought, got them to miss a couple of shots in the second half.”

“Rebounding, we were able to get down and play against their defense before it got set at times. Lo and behold, you look up and it’s under the eight and it’s a seven-point game with a wide-open look from three. On the road, at a place like this, what else could you really ask for, especially after coming out of the gates in the middle of the first half not playing great.”

Coach, I’ve been coming here 33 years, and this is one of the toughest venues to play in, I’ve watched it over the years. But, as you were just saying, not giving up, fighting until the end, if you’re going to lose you gotta go down swinging, I thought we went down swinging today.

“Yeah, we did for sure. And you look, even, and it ends up being 89-75, we were on track probably for them to be in the 79-81 range, for most of that. But me, if we have a chance to try to win the game, I’m going to do whatever we can to try. Fouling, trapping, we gave up some stuff, and so it ends up 75-89. That probably is not a tremendous indication of what really happens. But our guys fought, and they were executing stuff down the stretch. They were getting after it, they had good life. I was really encouraged by that.”

Kobe Knox was great for you tonight, maybe best game we’ve seen him play, not just the fact that he had his career-high points, he was active in a lot of ways. Meechie was a tale of two halves, he was tremendous in the second half, in the first half just didn’t seem like himself. What was going on there, was it the way they were guarding him?

“No, and this would not be the first player in the history of basketball that had a rough first half and then a tremendous second half, right? But what stands out was that it was not aggressive in the first half and very aggressive in the second half. Those are the things that you should say, unless they’re putting a box-and-one on you or something crazy, he’s still…and he did some things, he drove in the paint, kicked, got Kobe a wide-open three by driving and getting in the paint, he was still doing some things, I don’t want to say that.”

“But as a scorer, in fact there was a three-point attempt across from their bench and he hesitated and then he shot it. I was shocked, honestly, that you would even do that. Whatever that was happening, and within him, that changed in the second half and he was back to the guy that we’ve known and grown to love and expect to play well. He was being really aggressive in the second half.”

Nordin Kapic, you talked about having, didn’t tell me who, but you said there were some folks that were getting reps in practice that you were going to put into the game that you hadn’t seen much of in conference play. Nordin played 10 and a half minutes, did you like what you saw from him?

“I did, I did. Honestly, I thought the best thing he did was defensively. This is what those minutes were so valuable for because while he didn’t make any of his threes, ok, he hadn’t been in any real games or on the road at Alabama, maybe there was some of that that was going there, and I banged a couple home at practice yesterday, what he did, he did a good job defensively.”

“I think in some of his ball-screen coverages he was one of our more active bigs. I was really happy with what I saw out of him defensively, and in reality, that’s how you earn more minutes, is by going out there and doing things that are expected of you. Not necessarily playing great, he didn’t make the shots, but he was doing what we had asked him to do and was doing it with a lot of energy.”

They, obviously, are hard to guard, when you talk about what you need to do defensively, when they were making those threes in the first half was there anything you weren’t happy about or were they just knocking down some tough shots?

“Yeah, it’s both. I mean, we talk in our program a lot about how to trim the fat. And these games are going to be played in the margins a lot of the time. So there were some that just, that’s what they do. They’re going to do that, he’s going to shoot that shot. If you react any more than that, you’re going to lunge at him, he’s going to get a layup. So there’s some of that built in, but then there were a couple times, there was one in transition, Meechie didn’t get back effectively. There was another time Eli, on an out-of-bounds play, fell asleep as he was running off of a stagger screen.”

“So there were probably three of them, and you say ‘only three’, but that’s nine points that you could trim off just with concentration. Just with concentration. And then, they still do their thing and make those threes and that’s kind of how they do. I just watched them in the Ole Miss game, they scored 31 points or 34 points, whatever it was in the first half, and 61 in the second half. And we told the guys, they’ll go through some stretches where they don’t make threes, which is what they did in the second half, and honestly they hit a big one late that kind of put it where it was going to be hard for us when we were pressing and they still were shooting threes.”

It’s one thing to take threes, it’s another to make them. And that was the difference in the game, every time we made a little push, they came up big. And even at the end of the game, they were still shooting threes and it was sort of the nail in the coffin from behind the arc again because they made them.

“Yeah, they did. That’s what it boils down to. We can mention this until the cows come home, they also had a seven-point lead, had it down to seven, and had a wide-open three to cut it to four. Who knows what happens in this building, how the fans react to that, who knows how the players, who I’m sure expected to win the game, who knows how they react when they look up, and with under eight minutes left, it’s a four-point game, guys. What’s that look like for us? It’s a make-or-miss, oftentimes, league.”

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