Post Game Quotes: Northwestern
1/3/2018 12:00:00 AM | Women's Basketball
On the offense being smoother…
Yeah, you know, I give Rutgers credit. I mean you know that, you've been around woman's basketball for a long time, so you know how that's the Rutgers way. You got to give them a lot of credit, but we were really trying to focus a little bit more on getting up and down, and playing a little bit faster and I thought Northwestern was a little bit young. A couple of their key kids were freshmen and sophomores and I thought they weren't as deep, maybe, to play that pace, so I thought we did a really good job out of the gates playing faster and our press was kind of setting them off and we were changing up what we were doing in it, and I thought our kids did a really good job.
On Taryn (McCutcheon)'s progression…
Yeah, we were just actually talking about how she needs to do more for us, you know. For the minutes she was logging, I think offensively she had kind of been deferring so much that the last handful of games were kind of 5-on-4. She does a lot of other things for us. She gets us in the offense, she gets back on transition, she's good defensively, but you got to be able to play both sides of the ball. We were actually kind of as a staff, if you look at her OAR, her numbers were dropping to the point where we were like, maybe we should kind of look at some different people, you know, and then the kid goes out there and knocks some stuff down, which was good. She just played within herself, but I thought she did a much better job of being aggressive, and looking for her shot.
On Taryn (McCutcheon)'s progression shooting it from deep…
I don't mind it. I think she's got to mix it up a little bit though, I mean there's no reason for her to shoot a 26-footer when you can toe yourself up to the line. I think there's times, with her size, she's got to do some of that, but I think she was kind of settling in to shooting those so deep that it was setting her off balance. I know she hit a few deep ones tonight, but I guess to me, I kept talking to her about getting in scoring pockets, you know she was starting our offense outside of scoring pockets as a point guard and that was affecting our ability to shorten our passes and play kind of downhill, and then obviously I think she did a much better job of looking for her shot, those two things. You know, I told her to be more aggressive in scoring pockets.
On being 9-1 when getting over 41 boards…
That's been something we've worked on. We are obviously a big team and I thought we did a nice job, and when you have the ability to play, we played everybody double digit minutes tonight, so I felt good. We should have fresh legs for people to dive in there, at least offensively, and go get it. I still think we're a little suspect at times, the defensive rebounding. I think we have one kid you can rely on defensive rebounding night in, night out and that's Branndais (Agee). The kid just goes to go get it. Everybody else is kind of hit or miss a little bit, so we've been emphasizing it, working on it, trying to kind of finish things up, because I felt like it kind of cost us the last game to be honest, and there's been times when it's been our Achilles heel. I thought our kids were much, much better focusing on rebounding tonight as a whole, but it's good to know, get more than 40 rebounds and win games, 70 points or more, you'll probably win games, that kind of thing. Just keeping it simple.