Bowling Green State University Athletics
Dan Dakich Press Conference Quotes
January 23, 2006 | Men's Basketball
Jan. 23, 2006
What did you think of Buffalo after watching their game against Central?
I thought that Central was very good and I think Buffalo is obviously very good. In our league, crazy things happen.- Buffalo got down by as many as 22 but there was no quit in them and they got it back to three very fast. That's maybe as fast as I have ever seen a team go from down mid to low 20's to back to three. I don't know if it was an aberration for Buffalo, but Central played real well."
Has it been hard for a team with not quite the experience that you have had in the past to close out games?
"Yeah it has been, and we have tried to work on it. Like with most teams from the start of the season, we have put them in similar situations every day in practice. We will make it down four with two minutes to go or up one. We did it early in the year and we continue to do it, but that really isn't the situation that hurt us. The situations that have hurt us have been up seven to down three in a five-minute span. In the Toledo game, I thought that we handled that. We took a couple quick shots, but we handled it. In the Northern game, from 12 minutes to go to about six or seven minutes we did what we did in the Ball State game; we took quick shots, we didn't understand the way the game was going. In the Ball State game they were calling fouls on drives, a lot of them. We talked about that in huddles, but we didn't recognize it when we were playing, we settled for jump shots and that's lack of experience. We are not necessarily agewise a young team, but in experience we are a very young team. Unfortunately for us, handling these situations like that did not come about in the non-conference season because we were either getting beat bad or beat up someone pretty bad."
"You are not going to get or give up a four-point, five-point or seven-point play, so you should just relax and move the ball. In the Ball State game, we took a couple quick shots but then relaxed, moved the ball a little bit, got fouled and missed the front ends of a couple one and ones. At the end of the day, if you make those (free throws) your in decent shape. There is a lot to it, and that's part of it. Standing up in front of a crowd and making one and ones on the road when the other team is going."
Upcoming week: Is this the toughest stretch so far?
"Probably so far, yeah I would think. I am not going to lie to you, I didn't know who we played on Thursday until about five minutes ago. With our team, I don't pay attention to anything other than the day. You're playing a team that is 13-4, that's a long ways away from 4-9. We need to play and execute for forty minutes better than we did the other night.
How about Steven Wright's play since coming off the bench?
"Personally, I think he (Wright) has had a better concentration and just worries about playing hard. I think when he came back, scoring was kind of a big deal to him because he saw we needed another scorer and he was projected as that. After the Western Michigan game, I sat him down on the bus for an hour and half, I'm not going to play you anymore playing like this. Your going to have to earn your stripes because your not guarding, your not leading, your just out there trying to score. Your telling me all the right things and your numbers look decent but your not helping us win. He's played pretty well from that point on. I think it has been, I'm just going to play hard. When you do that and use your ability, the scoring and all that just take care of itself."
What about your team right now?
"I'm not going to let a one-point road loss get me in a panic about how we're playing because I like the way we've played. I think we've competed, I think this is a hard-playing team."
