North Carolina State University Athletics
NC State-Furman Coaches Quotes
2/4/2008 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
NC State head coach Jim Valvano
“The only good thing about it was that we got a W’. When you play as poorly as we did, the credit always goes to the opposition. They caused all the problems we had tonight. We just didn’t have a good performance.
“We’re happy to have won, and it was No. 11 for us. We struggled for everything. To be honest, when you’re used to playing with the clock, you don’t play a lot of pressure defense. You’ve got to do that to force people out of the things they do well. It was a tough game, but the most important thing is that we got a win.
“We’ll have to play a lot better if we hope to beat The Citadel. We wanted to play well tonight. We tried to play well. But we didn’t.
“I’m very pleased with the play of Terry Gannon. He’s a young man who’s come into his game lately and given us double-figure scoring. I’m really pleased with him. We need everybody. We’ve really had a lot of adversity. We played well at
Furman head coach Jene Davis
“I think our kids battled and gave as much as they had to give. We showed good patience offensively. If you take away my technical foul, we might have won.
“We were very nervous to begin with, but did an excellent job defensively from the outset. (Thurl) Bailey is a great player, very tough to stop inside, but we did an excellent defensive job on everyone else.
“This is a period of transition for our team, and we are in a developmental stage (with our man-to-man). We are not going to change from a man-to-man just because we are playing a certain type of opponent.
“Morris and all our inside kids did an excellent job. We were saddled with foul problems, but our inside play was very, very good.
“Hopefully, tonight won’t affect tomorrow, but realistically, it might. We will try to eliminate our mistakes, and hopefully play a little better than tonight.
“This is a great set of games for us. It gives us a chance to play two great teams in front of a large crowd. It is a well-run tournament.”
