Dusty May and Roddy Gayle after win vs. Howard

I want to begin by congratulating Howard on a fantastic season. Sometimes when you scout an opponent, it's not easy on the eyes. But watching those guys, they're well coached. They play well together.

They have great passion and life and spirit to them. And obviously that's a tribute to their university, to their athletic department, and everyone that they represent. So, what a great story. But happy with our guys.

We stayed the course. We thought we took a haymaker from them in the first half. And our guys never played scared. They never played tight.

They just continued to get to the next possession and found a way to separate in the second half.

Well, these games are tricky, as we saw earlier with Duke and Siena. And I thought Duke handled that near upset with great maturity. When things weren't looking great for them— and this is what I learned, and we learned from it today— they didn't try to, to go one-on-one and play hero ball. They made some hustle energy plays, and those are the ones that turned the tide.

Offensive rebounds, second, third shots, maybe a stop that turns into a transition basket. Um, but you know, we, we, I mean, we have a lot of respect for Howard, especially, um, I don't know if anyone's a fan of Malcolm Gladwell like I am, but David versus Goliath, according to Malcolm, wasn't necessarily a an upset because there's a slingshot involved.

And in the first half, Howard had their slingshots out. They were shooting the COVID off of it, off the bounce, off the catch. And so I was actually thinking like, this is how they usually happen. Fortunately, we were able to score the ball also.

We took it, we did a good job against their pressure. We were able to get it inside, especially in the second half, and take advantage of what the game was giving us.

Yeah, obviously it hurts just because of how well he was playing. I probably should go back and watch a couple of his subpar games just so I'm not missing him quite as much. But obviously his point of attack defense was incredibly effective. And then now flip the script.

Every time that Trey has a bad possession, and there aren't many of them, I think, wow, this is great reps for him now, later, whatever the case. I just— I'm a big believer in you learn from going through failure or difficult or, you know, just things like that. And so you're going against a small, quick team that's pressing you. You know, we don't have a great ball handling lineup per se on the court, and he's got to manage the game.

He's got to get it where it needs to get to. Then he's got to get us organized. And so I, in my mind, I'm thinking, great, this is awesome for him because if L.J. was here, he'd be getting all these reps and then no one else would be other than Elliot Cadeau and L.J. There wouldn't be anyone else having an opportunity to manage the game like this.