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

South Carolina men’s basketball coach Lamont Paris spoke with the media after a 72-63 loss to the Kentucky Wildcats on Tuesday night.

Here is everything he had to say.

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Opening Statement

“Well, there’s a lot of things as you look at the game that I’m going to look at and say ‘we could’ve done that better with a little more effort, we could’ve shot the ball a little bit better.’ But when the dust all settled, we put ourselves in position to win the game late in the game. It was a variety of decisions and plays that we did not make at that time, or the decisions weren’t great decisions, combined with a couple of plays they made.”

“Four-point game, they hit a big three to go up seven, they made some plays during that time. But, we also had some real breakdowns in those moments and at critical times. Every play counts the same, but as we know, as you get in those scenarios, it just seems like they matter more at that time. Unfortunately, we didn’t make a lot of those plays, but we did a lot of good things.”

“Obviously, defensively, I thought we did a really good job. This is probably the third game in a row I thought the execution of our gameplan, particularly when you have one player that’s not only a very capable scorer but he’s been playing well as of late, and so I thought our attention to that was good. I give us a lot of credit for that. That was probably a big contributing factor to us having a good chance to win the game when it was all said and done as you wind down into the last moments of the game.”

Lamont, I know you haven’t watched film yet, but when it comes to rebounding totals, if you know you’re maybe not as big or as tall as the other team, how do you kind of break it down in film between ‘ok, you could’ve made that with more effort,’ and ‘you can’t do anything about that one'”?

“I think honesty matters…and there’s a lot that goes into just the total number. If you shoot the ball really well, you have less opportunities for offensive rebounds. But the offensive rebounds in particular is what I look at, and how those come about. You just have to be really honest. And by and large, there’s a level of physicality and will and desire that goes into getting those rebounds.”

“Urgency, particularly with defensive rebounds, urgency and I think also viewing yourself as the guy that goes and gets the rebound. I think we have a lot of guys that don’t view themselves as the guy that goes and gets it when it’s all said and done. Therefore they probably just can’t, or don’t, consistently have the urgency that one would have if they’ve always been the guy that was in charge of all the rebounding.”

“I put it on the guys in the locker room…I mean, I’m going to spend all day tomorrow devising the defense that can prevent offensive rebounding from happening. That’s what my whole day will look like tomorrow, the entirety of it. If I fail to do that, then I’ve put it on the guys to come back on Thursday and say ‘what do we need to do at practice.’ Forget the gameplan and strategy, it’s helped us with some of this defensive stuff, but forget the gameplan if it’ll help us rebound the ball defensively better.”

“I’ll be interested to hear what they say about that, but it’s just hard to win games when you don’t defensive rebound, unless you have, you know, we took 97 points in the last game, we had it all going and we gave up 23 second-chance points. There’s a buffer, you can have a buffer if you do that, but on a day that you don’t shoot the ball in, the buffer is tissue-paper thin.”

Lamont, you guys started off strong in both the first and second half. But at the later points in those halves, struggles kind of set in and scoring droughts, not shooting the ball consistently well, what was probably the main difference from the way you guys started each half and the way things kind of closed out there?

“In some ways, we did, to start the game off, like today we had a couple of plays that we wanted to specifically look at at the beginning of the half and then we did the same thing at the beginning of the second half. I like to play without a lot of plays, honestly myself. I think it’s harder to scout, and I think as I player I’d feel better just organically getting into decisions and reads and whatnot. And so some of it may have been in those situations in this particular game. Now, we’ve had other games where we did the same thing and got off to a terrible start.”

“Had some nice plays drawn up, I look at Florida here. We had two great situations, one was an iso for Meechie at the beginning of the game, he turned it over, and the other one was a wide-open shot for Elijah Strong, and he missed it. So, it’s not that, but this is a game of runs. They’re probably going to say the same thing: ‘we had this and we did this, we got up this much, and then next thing you know we look up and we’re only up two with such and such left over.’ So that’s just the way basketball goes, generally. In this particular game, I did think we got some good looks, the first play of the second half, or second play of the second half, we ran a little isolation for Elijah to get the ball at the elbow, it’s his sweet spot, and jab-jumper and he did it and made it, and it looked great when it works out that way.”

“But he also could have missed it, and then we’re not off to such a great start. But I think at the end of the day it’s a game of runs, and we were fresh and made some shots, and then at certain times we didn’t.”

You mentioned defensively kind of playing up to your expectation to the most part, but how would you kind of describe your team’s connectivity on that side of the ball, especially considering how much off-ball movement a team like Kentucky normally has?

“Yeah, I think it’s been good. That’s where the most of our growth has happened. I’d say in two areas defensively, really three areas. One is just our…we’ve had a couple of guys make a significant improvement in their ability/willingness/whatever to stay in front of the ball. I think that’s one area. I think on our concentration and focus on the details of what we actually say we’re going to do, and understanding the concept. I think it’s better to understand the concept of why we’re doing it, rather than to say ‘I remember when the ball goes there, I have to go here.’ It’s hard to remember every time, but conceptually if you understand the concept, you will just naturally do those things.”

“I think that’s another area that we’ve really improved upon. And then also the connectivity that it takes and the communication to handle a lot of these situations. I thought we did a really good job, even when I mentioned that three that they got when it was a four-point game and it went to seven, we were switching and then they switched it and we got cross-matched and they set a quick fade again and we seamlessly switched it back, which honestly should’ve probably helped us in that scenario. And then, guy shoots a deep three and we weren’t quite urgent enough at that time probably.”

“But I think our communication and connectivity on the defensive end is really what has allowed us to…I’ll tell you the other one, the Mississippi State game, was very similar to that. There were so many things going on, between who was coming off of what ball screen and if it was a five-man defending the ball screen we did one thing, if it was the four-man defending the ball screen we did another thing, and both of those things varied, whether it was Hubbard coming off the ball screen or anybody other than Hubbard coming off the ball screen. So a lot of different things that guys had to do, and we’ve really done a good job in that particular area.”

Lamont, you alluded to the defense on Oweh, and you guys probably did the best job anybody’s done all year in terms of not letting him get downhill, but there were four guys, Dioubate and Jelavic wound up scoring I think 23 points between them. Do you have to give up something, and is that what you guys were giving up?

“Probably, but I think Dioubate one time we let him drive from the corner all the way across the lane for a left-handed layup. I mean, there’s reasons why guys are players for sure, Jelavic, there were a couple of threes, early in the game he missed a couple of threes, that can really impact a guy, that was a part of our whole…there’s an equation that you have to win a game, right? And him making a couple of shots was part of that equation, but for us today, Oweh scoring 24 was not part of our equation.”

“I thought that was not the recipe for us to have a good chance to win the game. So we played in a way where that was not likely to happen, and with that, you give up 72 points. My guess is that, in their highest-scoring games, you probably had Oweh with a lot of points. But you hold them to 72, and that’s with second-chance points. Our first possession defense again was good, so I was really happy with the execution of the gameplan and what we did on him. He’s not an easy guy to do a good job on because he’s so physical, he forces the action, he’s strong, and he can make you foul him.”

“I thought we did a really good job on him, and overall defensively, thumbs up. Defensive rebounding is part of what defense is, so we have to improve there, but I would say you have to give something up but we did a pretty good job overall.”

Lamont, apologies for a similar kind of question, in the first half there it was 28 points for Kentucky total, but Denzel Aberdeen had about 40% of those. What does he do that makes him difficult to defend, or were you just trying to let him make plays, shut everybody else down?

“Well, here’s what you have to understand as a coach, this is going to sound contradictory to what I just said, but ultimately I’m most concerned with ‘they had 28 points in the first half,’ so what do I care if it’s Aberdeen or a manager that scored. We held them to 28 points in the first half, and we had some moments where we had some things going offensively, I think we were on 15 for like half an hour. But at the end of the day, that’s what I’m most concerned about. He’s a good player, Aberdeen.”

“There’s another world where somebody probably says ‘hey, our recipe to win the game is that Aberdeen has to have a bad day,’ and someone else is going to have that recipe as their recipe to win. Ours, we picked the guy that was preseason player of the year, and he’s a good scorer. In his last however many games, he’s really scoring the ball well. We selected him, and then whoever else did whatever else for the most part of the game, like I said, it’s cooked into the equation, you don’t overreact to it, it’s just kind of cooked into what you’re doing.”

Lamont, we’re kind of belaboring this point, but I was going to bring up that today was Oweh’s 64th game at U-K and it’s only the fourth time that he didn’t reach double-digits. In those other three games, Kentucky lost. So if someone told you that you were going to hold him to eight points tonight, I would have had to think you fancied your chances of winning?

“Yeah, and so if you say that, they’re at 72, that’s with some of the stuff at the end of the game, we’re pressing, you get a run-out and go to the other end, you’re at 72, let’s call it a 66-point game. I like my chances to win in a 66-point game against a team that knows how to score the ball. At the end of the day, I thought our chances were better to hold them to a manageable number if the known offender of scoring the points most consistently did not score, or had a hard time scoring as many points. That was our gameplan, and I thought we did it well.”

“I think we gave up a manageable number defensively…and again, that number is also with second-chance points that we didn’t do a great job of defending, getting our defensive rebounds. This was also a day where we didn’t score the ball effectively enough.”

Hey coach, heading into the locker room at halftime, what was your message to your athletes following the long scoring drought towards the end of the first half?

“Honestly, I think it was 21-28, is that what it was at halftime? ‘I mean guys, look what we’ve done defensively, in what world can we score 21 points and only go in down seven’? Rather than belaboring what you did not do, I think you want to concentrate on some of the things that you did do. I just think in the game…sometimes, trust me, you’ve got to point out what didn’t happen with some aggression, but mostly it’s more about what did, ‘what are you doing, this is what we are doing, let’s continue this, can we change that, we can change that.'”

“And we got good looks. Eli Ellis missed a layup under the rim. We had a variety of wide-open threes. Nordin Kapic, and maybe that was part of their plan, to have some of those guys shoot that haven’t shot the ball incredibly well this year. But I really did, honestly, like what our shot selection looked like in the first half. I thought if we had a reasonable day in terms of efficiency, I think we were really low on two-point field goal percentages and they were good looks at two-point field goals. So I was happy with what we did, you’ve just got to play better at the end of the day.”

“These guys, my job is to sit on a chair, their job is to play. They’ve got the better job of the two, it’s not even close. They, sometimes, you’ve got to play a little better.”

Going back to the defense, you guys forced 15 turnovers, which was their season high. Other than limiting Oweh, maybe getting the ball out of his hands, was there anything that you saw that led to that?

“I think most of the decisions were made in a crowd. Our rotations were really good. We spent the last two days really doing that. There weren’t as many open, clean scenarios for guys to make straightforward decisions. And honestly, some of the straightforward decisions are the decisions that a guy is reluctant to make because the straightforward decision gets the ball out of my hands quickly. And I wouldn’t want to do that, guys don’t want to do that. You’re a talented player, and now you have to get the ball out of your hands within a couple of seconds just for the good of the greater good, and I just think guys don’t want to do that normally.”

“I think that’s really what it was, there were a lot of guys around, decisions had to be made in traffic, and we were willing to put our body in front of another body so it was effective. It was effective for us in this particular game, and that’s the beauty of it, we’ll go and play on Saturday and we’ll have a completely different strategy for a completely different team, hopefully we can be effective in that one, too.”

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