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VIRGINIA BASKETBALL
Postgame Quotes
Virginia 68, Radford 66
Virginia Head Coach Dave Leitao
Opening statement:
“This time of year there are a lot of games that on paper one team has an advantage, either by age or skill or conference. I pointed that out to the team the other day, when I saw that Mercer had beaten Auburn. That is the last thing I want to do and we’ve been fortunate in three-plus years here that we haven’t lost to teams that we probably should beat. By chance today, we made a play or two at the end or they didn’t execute a play or two at the end, and we were fortunate to win. For the second consecutive game, we haven’t exactly played the game we’ve intended to from day one in practice. If we don’t make a decision to turn the corner, both psychologically and physically, these nights that we eek out wins are going to turn to losses, and unfortunately they’re going to start stringing together. So we have a lot of work to do in a short period of time to start to get serious about doing our work if we have any vision of being a good team.”
On playing so many players in the first half:
“We were just looking for a spark to give us some kind of emotional or physical boost.”
On missed three-pointers:
“I can tell you specifically why we’re not making shots, and it’s not because we don’t have good shooters. We’re not creating, through our offense and our execution, comfortable threes. We take them as a last resort. We take them because we need to take them or just because a guy’s open. You don’t make shots like that. You make them off of ball movement and body movement and inside-out passing. We really haven’t had that at all in any of the three games. We’ve got to buckle down and start playing as a five-man unit and sharing the basketball and understanding what’s going to work and what’s not going to work.”
On Sylven Landesberg:
“Sylven, right now for good, for bad, for indifferent, is oblivious. He just plays basketball. He’s not really affected by anything at least not yet. I think because he is naturally an attacker, he challenges the defense. He finds openings. It has allowed him to get to the rim, it has allowed him to gain confidence. It has allowed him to just play the game. He does a number of things well. He’s got a number of things he’s got to learn and grow with, like every young guy. At the very least, he’s got the right frame of mind right now. It’s allowing him to play well this early in the season.”
Radford Head Coach Brad Greenberg
Opening statement:
“I think we are a better team than we were a year ago and I thought we played a pretty good game. I think we learned a lot about what we can do to get even better. I think the only difference in the game was [Sylven] Landesberg’s ability to get into the middle in the second half. He was the key to their offense and we could not keep him from getting into the middle of the court. That was the difference in the game.”
On the change in tempo over the last two minutes of the game:
“We didn’t play as purposefully as you would like. We had that one steal and we threw the ball away on the breakaway that could have given us a few more points lead, but I think the whole thing was more on the defensive end. They were able to score. When we went into our 1-3-1 zone, they got the ball in the middle a little too easily. They were able to penetrate that and you want to keep them out of the middle in that defense. Overall, our defense was terrific. They shoot 37 percent from the field and 11 percent from beyond the arc. We played good defense, but in the last few minutes, their best player was able to make most of the plays. That’s what happens when games are close: the best player on the court for the last three or four minutes has a chance to win the game.”
On the benching of Artsiom Parakhouski late in the game:
“Eric Hall was doing a good job rebounding and Joey [Lynch-Flohr] is a little more polished right now as a low post scoring threat. I wanted to see if we could get Joey the ball in his favorite spot where he had a chance to go to work and Eric was doing a good job rebounding. [Parakhouski] took a couple off off-balance shots and needed a break and the combination out there was going pretty good.”
On Kenny Thomas taking a shot late:
“He is a good shooter and he made a strong move. We wanted to try to free up either he or Martell [McDuffy] to catch the ball in the flow, by running them on the baseline and crossing. As for Aaron Austin, as a freshman, that’s a tough situation for him to be in all of the sudden down the stretch… At least he got the ball into Kenny’s hands where he had a chance to create something.
Virginia Guard Sylven Landesberg
On making the game-winning points:
“I didn’t really feel too much pressure this time. I didn’t look at the time. I knew what the score was, but I just didn’t worry about the time and what would happen or if I would miss it or make it.”
On the close game:
“These past three games have ultimately been really close. I guess they’ve been learning experiences, so we’re just going to take them and get better from them.”
Virginia Center Tunji Soroye
On the team’s performance:
“I’m not really satisfied with the way I played tonight. I haven’t played in a year, so I’m just getting back in the groove. With time, I’ll be better. We have a lot of young guys who don’t really know what it’s about yet. With time, we’ll be fine. The team has a lot of passion, they just don’t know how to display it on the court.”
On teammate Sylven Landesberg:
“When they recruited him, they knew what they were getting. He made some great plays and we’re very happy to have him.”
Radford Guard Martell McDuffy
On Radford’s preparation for the game:
“Our mentality was to give it our best shot, and the whole week we were saying we could win this game if we go out there and work hard. The whole time we were thinking it’s just two teams and we’re both alike, so let us just go out there and give it our best shot and we could possibly come out with a win.”
On Radford’s defense:
“It started as soon as our season ended last year. They drilled us constantly on defense. That’s what we do in practice; we have almost an hour where we just do defense before we even take a shot. It was good to see that with some of our defensive principles we held a team like Virginia to such a low score.”
On what the team can take away from the game:
“Coming into an ACC school and pressing them all the way to the last second, we’re going to definitely take this as a big learning tool. Also learning how to finish games because we were right there….We know that if we play as hard as we did tonight, with a little cleaning up of things here and there, we’ll probably be pretty good this year.”
Radford Forward Joey Lynch-Flohr
On the loss:
“It hurts. The last time we played a team from another conference, I think our smallest margin of defeat was thirty points, so you take away that. We were with them the whole game and led a good portion of the game, but it still hurts because we were right there.”
On what a win would have meant for Radford:
“It would have meant more for our team individually, to bring us closer together. It would have done a lot for the program. It would have done great things.”