Walker picked a great night to the have the best game of his career .
These notes are typed during the press conference so they may not be verbatim, but they are close:
DeAndre Mathieu
We talked about it,,23 need to step up and play together when Hollins went down
Mo was a beast, he was an animal, he was unstoppable. I haven’t ever seen him like that. He’s a good player
I felt I had to score a bit, or get guys more open looks because Andre went down
We throw different guys in all the time, so we weren’t really worried
Coach told me, their pick and roll coverage wasn’t get aggressive. So I had to make the right decisions in the lane.
Austin Hollins
These 4 games have shown we can beat anybody and lose to anybody. It starts in practice.
I think this defensive performance we’ve had all year.
Malik didn’t know he’d be coming in for a Dre like that, and he handled it well.
Dre told us when he came back- keep playing, finish the game. It’s not about him, it’s a team sport.
Let the game come to me. I had a couple open looks that didn’t phase me. Most importantly, play defense.
Eliason
Keep your focus. Mo got in there and played his butt off. Everyone stepped up, everyone gave us something tonight
I think it has a lot to do with Coach P, we’re better than the sum of our parts
We do morning individual workouts everyday, just working on our skills everyday. That’s helped us a lot, we’ve all gotten better
He was pretty hard on us. He didn’t sugar coat it, he told us we lost who we were.*
We’ve had some interesting film sessions where he’s exposed a lot of us.*
Mo Walker
I’m a hungry player, I keep working hard, I want to improve everyday. I am unselfish, I don’t want to force anything.*
This is a rival game, we love to beat the badgers, that’s it, we gotta win
I knew they were undersized out there
(On Dre going out) We’ve got to rally around it, Dre’s one of our main guys. Everyone stepped up.*
(On Pitino) He just tells us we should be extremely confident in ourselves. We should have confidence from all the work we’ve done begind the scenes.*
Richard Pitino:
• Andre Hollins, we know it’s an ankle injury, we don’t know to the extent yet. He’ll get an MRI tomorrow.
• On if he thought they could win without Andre Hollins before the season – I didn’t have any type of expectations at the beginning of the year, just because I didn’t know what I was getting into. I feel like we have really good chemistry when things are clicking. They really believe that the whole is better than the parts.
• When you’re starting to become a good team, when Elliott’s not playing well, you can go to Mo Walker. Or when Dre Hollins gets injured you can go to Malik Smith.
• I really challenged the guys after the Iowa game. I thought Mo and Malik were tremendous.
• Every play that we run, ends in a post up. But he demanded it. We told the bigs – you have to demand the ball. Mo was posting up so big, that guys had to throw it in there. It was more him than me.
• (When The Daily asked what game Mo played well in – Concordia?) Boy – you guys have no respect for Mo Walker
• On Mo – In the OSU game, he really did some good things, he’s growing a little bit. He’s getting more confident, he’s starting to settle into his new body.
• On 1 TO in the 2nd half – we have not done a good job of taking care of the ball as of late. WI doesn’t pressure a whole lot, so plus 10 on the glass impressed me, shooting 59% really really impressed me, and I thought our defense was great.
• We established the inside with Mo, and they did a good job of taking that away, so it was Mathieu’s turn to attack the basket> When they take one thing away, you go at them with something else.
• I think they’re rubbing off on guys. Malik had shot a ridculous shot against Purdue, and as he pulled it out, I told him it was his turn to shoot it. That’s the kind of player he is, his confidence rubs off on everybody.
• I have Ben Johnson on my staff who’s from here, he had to say 10 times in meetings this is a big game. I said this is a league game. Ben said no, this is WI. I’ve got unbelievable respect fort the Badger snad Bo Ryan, he’s an unbelievable coach. Never finished under the top 4 or not in the tournament.
• I don’t think our fans understand how good they are, and how good The Barn is. People always ask me what I would change, I would not change one thing about it. This is as good as it gets.
• On Austin – I think he’s playing better than most people think. Things that people don’t see on a stat sheet.
• When you can shoot the ball, I think it opens up a lot of things.
• On players talking about getting into the dance – I haven’t even brought it up – they can talk all they want, I’m not going to listen.
• We’ve been up double digits, except for Michigan. I think they learned from that Purdue game, greatly. I think it taught us a lot about our team, we made a lot of mistakes, but we did a lot of good things.