Dusty May press conference after win over Middle Tennessee

I thought on the offensive end, he was awesome. And our guys did a better job at getting him in his spots. And, you know, I thought St. John's, we did a really good job of finding him in the flow. We were stopping to get organized, to look for him and run something for him.

And tonight, I think just about every dead ball, we ran something for him. At least the intent, and the intent was for him to create the advantage. And it seems off the top of my head like every time we ran something for him, something good happened. And part of that is we haven't done it so the other teams haven't scouted Yaxel Lendeborg in the mid post.

But that should be a good weapon going forward, especially with his unselfishness. I thought we generated, we're 5 for 25 from 3. I thought we generated paint-touch 3s for the most part with good shooters. And I felt like in the first half they were all straight hitting the back of the rim.

I think those shots are going to drop for us, but we're just trying to be a team that on the nights that they don't, we can still find a way. And so far, what are— how many games we played? 4. So we found a way to win 4 games, and 3 of them we haven't shot well.

And obviously, you know, we haven't been playing a low-level schedule. Wake Forest is a good ball club at TCU. You know, I watched them beat Texas Tech last year at home. They're a good program, good team.

And so, we're figuring ourselves out why we're able to win. But sooner than later, we have to start playing more efficient offensive basketball.

No, I didn't learn anything about the combinations. Off the top of my head, and I haven't looked at the numbers, we played the big lineup late and it seemed like it was dominant defensively again. It seemed like it wasn't quite as— there weren't— I don't think there was any rhythm offensively. And we have to fix some things.

We know what the issues are. We have to get our guys to do it more frequently. So no, not really. We're going to tinker.

I mean, I think Roddy Gayle's played as well as, you know, a 4-game sample size. Off the top of my head, he's probably played as well as anyone on our program, and he's coming off the bench. We're just looking for rotations. We're looking for guys that play well together.

We wanted to see Morez Johnson with that first group tonight versus Aday Mara. And then Aday Mara had missed a practice or so, so that went into the decision-making process. So, no, we're not married to anything right now. We're still looking for the right combinations and right rhythm, but it might be be just a night-by-night basis with this team until we figure it out. It might be 15, 20 games before we do.

I love what we can become defensively. And the assistant coaches were stressing that before the game, of giving these guys a tangible number of deflections. And we don't give a lot of tangible numbers. It's more of percentage of rebounds and percentage of this because we want to play with 90 possessions.

And if a team makes us play in the 60s and 70s, the numbers are skewed. But we didn't offensive rebound enough. We were more active today. I thought our intensity he was better.

And we've just let teams move the ball and be too comfortable against us. So I think we've got to do a, a better job going forward of when the offensive player catches the ball, his momentum is going away from the basket, so we're not on our heels as much. But defensively, we've got a very, very high ceiling. We could end up being one of the top teams in the country if we continue to, to get better, to, to learn the nuances of our defense, and then stay committed to it.