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Nov. 29, 2000
VIRGINIA HEAD COACH PETE GILLEN
I thought the biggest key to the game was our defense. We came out of thegate playing good, hard defense — a zone pressure to try to make themspeed it up a little bit. We gang rebounded. Our guards helped us on theboards. We didn’t want to play a half court game with Purdue because theyexecute better in the half court. Their half court defense is better thanours and their half court offense is better than ours. ? We just had a goodnight. It was great team victory.
Donald Hand had a tremendous game. We tried to have him push it right backat them and he had a great game. It was one of his better games in aVirginia uniform. ? He is not shooting the ball the way he is capable, buthe is distributing the ball, took care of it, made good decisions. He isplaying like a big time point guard. It is like a quarterback in football.When your point guard plays well, usually your team plays well. And he hada great game tonight.
Chris Williams was great in his first start because of his injury andsickness. He rebounded and was aggressive. When he is aggressive, he is adifferent player. On the boards, posting up, he was tremendous.
We have to take things day by day. Now, we just have to worry aboutin-state rival VMI on the road (Dec. 4). That should be a tough game. Theywill be very excited. You have to handle success and failure.
PURDUE HEAD COACH GENE KEADY
They came after us. They were very aggressive. Our kids played right intotheir hands with being tentative . We were not very good at attacking themand they got off to a nice start.
There were a couple of bright spots for us: Joe Marshall off the bench, ourfree throw shooting was pretty good. But the difference was in theassist/turnover ratio.
We let them run their offense. We made them do nothing that we wanted themto do. Their aggressiveness and assertiveness was the difference in thegame. They just played a lot better-started better and stayed with it.
(on Donald Hand) He’s hard to contain, very aggressive. I don’t think ourkids realized his quickness. We’re having a lot of difficulty with seniorteams. Arizona didn’t have seniors, and that helped us. Central Michigandid and this team did. Guys that know how to play and have been down theroad before have been hard for us to contain.
We felt like we had to be aggressive, attack their press, go base to baseand score, block off on the boards and be patient on offense, and none ofthe above happened.