Scott Skiles Early Quotations

Our focus early in this game was unacceptable for a game this big. Not all across the board, but a couple of our starters just weren't ready tonight.

We know what we're facing now. We're going down there, and it's going to be some sort of onslaught early in the game. We'll do our best to try and weather it.

At one point we had 11 field goals and eight of them were assisted. I thought our ball movement was good again, we played very unselfishly in general and we did what we had to do. We talked about trying to put them down early at least. It doesn't always work out the way you talk about it, but at least you get a nice lead and see how they react.

The stat sheet does not really show it, but they pretty much out-played us from beginning to end. We had a hard time in the early going even following our simple game plan. We tried different lineups to keep it close. In the third quarter, they took advantage of us and we could not do much to stop them.

They just dominated us all over the floor, and then probably the most disappointing thing -- I thought in the third quarter, we quit. That's something I have to address. ... We were in the game a little bit early on, but they had way more energy than us. They went by our guards at will.

It was kind of a typical exhibition game. We had a couple of guys who had trouble relaxing. I thought we had some really questionable shot selection and we struggled stopping them early in the game.

It wasn't like we had a total letdown or anything; we just softened up enough to let him get going. And once he got going, it was very difficult to get any momentum back. Early in the third, we went under a couple of times on screens. He made one, and that really opened his eyes. He put one right in the middle. That's a lesson that needs to be learned -- playing against great players like that, just one possession can get them going. Obviously, if you look at the whole year, the four games we played them, he's averaged well over 30 points against us. We didn't get it done against him this year.