Murray State University Athletics
Cronin addresses media conference
1/3/2006 6:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
OPENING STATEMENT: I'm looking forward to testing out the theory that we need to play a lot of games, and get in the rhythm of playing games. We've had a lot of practice here over the holidays. We got a couple more, and then we're going to be getting into a lot of games. We're looking forward to getting into the meat of the Ohio Valley Conference schedule and competing for a league championship and getting a high seed in the OVC Tournament. I think we've had a tough non-conference schedule, there's no question about that, and hopefully that's prepared us for what lies ahead here in January and February.
ON UPCOMING THREE-GAME STRETCH IN FIVE DAYS AFTER THE HOLIDAY BREAK: We have a lot of those; we have more than the usual, but our guys are ready to play. We don't have school so it's not a big deal to our guys. Fans will think it's a big deal but it's really not a big deal to the players. Our guys are used to quick turn-arounds in our conference. We all have to do it. I think every game is a big deal when you're trying to compete for a championship. You have to win them all at home. We've already given one away and we have to make sure we don't do it again.
ON UPCOMING OPPONENT, TENNESSEE STATE: Obviously, they are more of an interior-oriented team offensively, with Bruce (Price) going down (with a season-ending knee injury). I think they may have the best two big men in our league on the same team -- Larry Turner may be defensively, and Clarence Matthews may be offensively. They're big and strong and we have not played against two big guys like that this year. We were bigger than Cincinnati, actually. We have not had to play against a team that is primarily an interior team on the offensive end and really looks to pound it in with size and strength. It's going to be a major challenge, especially for our forwards, because Clarence Matthews is a load.
ON MATCH-UP BETWEEN TURNER AND PEARSON GRIFFITH: I like that match-up a whole lot better than the one with Matthews. Griffith's got size and strength and so does Turner. You got the two most natural true big men in the conference playing against each other. It will probably be a stand-off. The problem for us comes at the four spot, where Matthews is playing because he's a big, strong guy when he catches it in the deep post. Larry Turner gives them a shot-blocker, which is something they haven't had: an inside physical presence on the defensive end of the floor, which is where I think their team is the most improved. If you look at their stats, they're giving up like 42 or 43 percent from the field defensively, which is a big improvement for them. They play a mixture of man and zone, but with Turner around the rim, he can erase the mistakes because he's a more-than-capable shot-blocker.
ON REILEY ERVIN, TENNESSEE STATE'S POINT GUARD: He has to have a good game and play well for them because Bruce went down. He's a quick guy; he can make shots. Obviously, we'll look to wear him down and make it as hard on him as possible to have a good game. Coach (Cy) Alexander doesn't have a lot of options at the point guard position, so that's why he is a big part of their success. They have a wing-sub in (Andrae) Belton and an interior sub in (Courtney) Bohannon, but he really doesn't have a sub at the point guard position. That's something we will try to attack.
ON WAYNE ARNOLD, TENNESSEE STATE'S SHOOTING GUARD: We better not let him catch it and shoot it. From a statistical standpoint, his shooting is quite amazing. For a guy to be a known shooter, and still shoot 54 percent from the three-point line, that is unbelievable. That means that every scouting report says that Wayne Arnold is a shooter and you can't let him shoot, and people are trying everything they can not to get him attempts, and he's still making 54 percent, which means he's making some tough shots. He's shooting the ball with range, and a lot more confidence. He seems to be more comfortable than he was last year with his role on their team. I think that's probably why he's having more success. They've gone more towards being an interior team but they will have their moments where they try to get him off some screens and try to get him open shots.
ON TENNESSEE STATE'S CHANGE OF APPROACH WITH PRICE OUT: It changes immensely (when a player gets hurt). Their problem is, they have to do it in midstream, and you've done your whole pre-season and played a lot of your games, a bulk of your schedule. And now you lose what is arguably your best player. All of a sudden, you have to start over. You don't have a lot of practice time to do so, but I think they have a lot of talent. They just played an unbelievably tough schedule. I haven't looked at Tennessee State's schedule, but I think they just need a nice homestand. They have played a few home games, but I don't think they have played repeated home games, and I'm sure they'd like to play a nice homestand to get themselves realigned. It's hard, it's extremely hard to lose your best player. They have enough time here because they didn't play a lot of games early. They got about 18 games left. As they retool and get more comfortable, they're also going to have to worry about getting worn down, I'm sure that will be a concern -- getting worn down in games with a lack of a bench, getting worn down as the season goes on with a kid like Reiley Ervin logging so many minutes.
ON SOUTHEAST MISSOURI AND THEIR GUARD ROY BOOKER: I saw them for the first time last night, and it wasn't Roy Booker's night. I don't know how many points he ended up with but it was clearly not a great night for him. I think they're now a perimeter-oriented team, more than last year when they pretty much went strictly inside. Paul Paradoski is playing much better basketball, making shots, playing with more confidence. Terrick Willoughby had struggled, the announcers were saying, but he had a great first half. They run the motion offense, and they were impressive last night. That was my only time seeing them. But Booker's a guy you got to know where he is at all times. He's a true scorer because he can make shots, take it to the basket, and get fouled. He gets himself to the foul line. He's a guy who can hurt you in a lot of ways. They're rebounding the ball. I think they are a team that's on the improve, they have some guys who are getting minutes like (Andrais) Thornton and (Ketshner) Guerrier and Waylon Francis on the interior is getting better. Paradoski, like I said is getting better. And they got a go-to guy in Booker so, teams are going to struggle when they go into SEMO all year.
ON STARTING LINEUP: We're going to shuffle the lineup throughout the game. In terms of starting, it'll be a matter of matchups for us. We're pretty much set on who we're going to play -- we're going to play 10 or 11 guys and demand that we keep up good defensive pressure. We're going to try to win with defense, and we're going to try to not let you run your offense, and do everything we can to get after you and take you out of your comfort zone. We got enough bodies to do it, and we have to stay fresh because we have to keep guys fresh to keep them playing at the pace we want to play at both ends. Pace is something we have talked about a lot. And you have to be able to play your bench at the pace we want on both ends. We're still searching for who is our best lineup, but what I'm concerned with is our best lineup at the end of the game -- when you get into that close game in the last five minutes. That's when you have to figure out what your best lineup is at that point, when you need to get baskets and being able to convert on the offensive end in a close game to match a team. Sometimes, our problem has been that our best offensive unit is not our best defensive unit. But, I think some of our deficient defenders are improving, most notably at the small forward spot- I think both guys have improved there. That's a major area of concern. I think Marqise Wright is improving, and I think Mike McCoy is going to continue to improve. And Pearson Griffith's got to get back to being a defensive force. We start throwing him the ball now all of a sudden, he went from being Bill Russell to being Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He stopped blocking shots and he's become an offensive guy and he's forgot about the defensive end of the floor a little bit. We need to get him back and his activity on the defensive end needs to pick up on a consistent basis because when he is active defensively, we're a different team.
ON IMPORTANCE OF SETTING THE PACE: We're trying to set the pace both ways. Some teams try to do it solely defensively, and some teams try to do it offensively with pushing the ball. We try to do both, which is hard; it's taxing on our players. I don't know if our fans sometime even understand how hard it is for these guys, when we're trying to pressure every ball and deny every pass, get every rebound and loose ball, and then as soon as we get the ball, we're screaming at them to run the floor, run the lanes as fast as possible. It's hard to do, to play at that speed. And that's a good thing, except it's hard to do, and we practice it and we have 10 guys, and the other team doesn't have 10 guys and they don't practice that way. It's going to be to our advantage if we play that way. That's the theory behind it, trying to be able to do things that most teams can't do, as far as having the bench and being able to play at our pace. But it all starts with defense. Pace has got to be dictated with defense. What teams will try to do is just run 30 seconds off the shot clock every time, which is what Southern Illinois did, and what Samford does, and we can't let that happen. Another thing is that we have walked the ball up the floor, and that's nothing forced. As a game plan, you can come in and try to be judicious and run the clock because you have the ball. It's up to us to try to force your pace. And when we have the ball, we're in control of the pace, and that's something I thought we did a much better job of in the Rice game, trying to sprint the lanes, run the floor, and push the ball and be committed to it. It's interesting because in recruiting, all kids say they want to run and play up-tempo, and then when you get guys in, very few teams really do play up-tempo because when you try to get guys to run every time, it's not so easy. I just find that interesting because in recruiting, it's in the top three questions a kid asks: What style of play do I want to run? And then here you are in a system where that's what we do try to do and some guys you have to prod them to run the floor to the offensive end, which is unusual because most kids all say that that's what they want to do when you recruit them. It's just not so easy.
ON SETTING THE TEMPO BY USING SCORING RUNS: It all goes to opportunities. When you have opportunities and when you have the ball, you have to push the ball. Secondly, you need to offensive rebound so you can score and then pick them up full-court and dictate some tempo with your defense. We talk about what it takes to get on a run, and the biggest thing we tell our team that the glue to all runs -- 10-0 runs, 15-2 runs and all those types of runs -- are offensive rebounds. Very few times do you see a team come down and make seven straight shots. What you see is teams come down and make a couple shots, then miss a shot, get an extra shot and then lay it in. And certain teams have done a good job of keeping us off the offensive glass, and then they go down and they burn clock. When you don't score, you don't have the same step to your aggression. It's amazing what happens to teams, how aggressive they get after a dunk, after a couple made shots. It's amazing the stance a player will get in after he makes a shot. We talk about how guys either swell up or they deflate, depending on offense. And you try to teach kids that they can't let their offense dictate their attitude on the floor, but it's a fact. You just pick up the intensity when you're on a scoring run, there's no doubt about it. And the other team tends to panic because they know you're on a scoring run. Our offensive rebounding statistically against Southern Illinois are misleading because on a lot of blocked shots, we get credit for the rebound if it goes out of bounds. Those aren't offensive rebounds. And we missed so many shots, that was misleading as well; we didn't really get that many.
ON APPROACH AGAINST RICE ON GETTING TO THE LINE MORE: That will continue. We had a lot of meetings and a lot of film in the days off and between games. We basically played the equivalent of a football game on Wednesday, so our guys needed some rest on Thursday: a lot of meeting and a lot of film and a lot of talk about what it takes to win a championship. And you're not going to jumpshoot your way to a championship. I try to use analogies with the guys, because we were coming off playing a football game, I said, "Basically, you can't go deep on every play." It would be great if you could, but in football they say, "Well, how come they just don't throw it deep on every play?" It's because you have to massage the defense. You have to wear them down. That's why people run the ball in football. You also have to make the extra pass and keep your defense off the field by controlling the ball. So on offense, you can't just take the first 20-footer that you can get off. And I thought that's what we did against SIU. We shot ourselves out of the game. I thought we did it against Samford. I know a lot of people didn't get to see that game. When we were working the ball inside, we were winning the game and were in control of the game and all of a sudden, it became shoot the first 20-footer we can get off. And you're not going to jumpshoot your way to a championship. You got to be able to get the ball inside and understand how to drive and close out, get to the basket. And I'll give you an example of a guy on our team that is a totally different player when he attacks the basket and it's Shawn Witherspoon. He's a great example of a guy on our team when he attacks the basket, he's a different ball player. He's an all-league player. Because it gives him an attack mode, he shoots an unbelievable percentage from the two. Part of the reason for Darnell Hopkins being in the starting lineup is because he's another guy that understands how to attack the basket. He's our best guy driving body-to-body, and he's gotten better at not charging. There's no doubt that that's something that we've learned, hopefully. And I've tried to hammer that home from an offensive standpoint, because I don't believe in telling guys not to shoot the ball. You have to understand the game. And just because you can get a shot off doesn't mean it's a good one. We all have to understand that sometimes, we might need to pass one up and just be judicious enough to understand that we need to attack the basket more. We need to make the other team play defense, and then if they're on the scramble, then that's the time to attack. It's not just because we have them scrambling that we should fire the first shot, because you're not going to win that way. You're going to win when you make them and you're going to lose when you don't. We got better quickly at throwing it inside and driving it inside and trying to attack with a little more toughness and we're going to continue to work at it. It scared me when I saw where we were in three-point field goals made. At one point I think we were 10th in the country. But that's all relative to how many you're shooting, though. And that can also correlate to no free throws.
ON LACK OF FREE THROWS: I know we should have had at least two more free throws last Wednesday. There's a lot of reasons. We haven't played many games with OVC officials. So, it will be interesting to see how many free throws we shot in the games we had OVC officials. But at the same time, we have to take the ball to the basket more, we have to throw it inside more, there's no doubt about it. The formula for us is understanding good shot/bad shot, and understanding the game, understanding there's a time to shoot the three, and there's a time to throw it inside. And when everything's equal, and I can shoot the three, or I can throw it to the big man on the block, we're throwing it to the big man on the block. We got one guy on our team who needs to not pass up any three-point shots and I think we all know who he is (Tyler Holloway).
ON CONFIDENCE IN KEITH JENIFER AND TREY PEARSON PLAYING THE POINT: It's not a matter of confidence for me; it's the matter of playing the best lineup to help my team win. I think Darnell Hopkins gives us more physical strength. I think he and Tyler give us a guy at the two spot that the other team has to defend that's a scoring threat. I think Trey at some times becomes a non-scoring threat for whatever reason. Fatigue is probably one of them. He suffers from a lot of dead-leg syndrome at times when I play him too many minutes. And I think we have become too easy to defend as a team sometimes when they're on the floor together. But it all depends on how they're playing and how the flow of the game is going.
ON THE BIGGEST OVC SURPRISE: Well, I'm not surprised about Samford. I was getting ready to say Austin Peay would have been the biggest surprise, because they seemed to really be rolling until Sunday night. But I believe they played without Zac Schlader Sunday night, and that's an area where they're not deep with backups, so I'm sure that hurt them. (Tennessee-Martin head coach) Bret Campbell and I are good friends, and obviously I'm happy to see him doing well. And I would love to continue to see him do well, as long as he's not doing it against me (laughs).
