Post Game Quotes: Oakland
12/2/2016 12:00:00 AM | Women's Basketball
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MSU head coach Suzy Merchant
On Tori Jankoska…
She was amazing. A few assists away from a triple-double and a legit one that's very efficient. She took 16 shots. It wasn't like she was shooting 25-30 times to get there. She's really doing everything she can on the offensive end to be competitive and attack, block different ways. This team has been through a lot. We've traveled so much. We've been gone so much. We've played nine or eight games in a short span. I mean, you go west coast then go to New York and have a one-day prep for some super close game and our kids were really tired. So to see her step up and do that as a senior, I think is really inspiring, really and I was proud of how she performed tonight.
Tori has done that her whole career, basically. Not so much her freshman year, from sophomore year on, she's just tough. She's a competitor and she's got a lot of heart and competes, believes in herself and is really confident. I feel like having her out there maybe a little bit tired is better and she's experienced and she kind of knows what's going on out there and scouting reports and things like that. But I think she got tired some. Her and Taryn [McCutcheon] have been logging a lot of minutes and we just need to get better consistency out of some other people so I can rest them more.
On the tough schedule…
I don't remember it ever being like this. We went to a sixteen game schedule, it's like we're going to play 13 games in 32 days and then turn around and play 16 Big Ten games in 60 days basically. So, it's a huge change. It's just been a lot and throw that Europe trip on there too and it's like these kids are struggling a little bit and we just need to practice. When you play this many games, it's hard for you to work on certain things that we need to work on. We keep showing it in the game, better than what we're showing, but we just don't have time to really spend quality time to get enough practices with a really, really young team and a freshman point guard that needs to kind of battle things out.
On the defense…
The third quarter was really bad in terms of our ability to guard anybody. Honestly, I think we're just exhausted and we're just not getting back. I think some of these kids, it's a struggle too. Drek [Madekia Cook] has got an issue with her leg and can hardly play. And then you've got Brandi [Agee] out there who has had two ACL's and two pins in her feet and just came back early this fall. These kids are kind of just… we have some depth issues a little bit at the guard play, which is what our strength was. We have to take care of the ball better and we need to… to me, it was the defensive side of the ball in that stretch, we gave up 32 points in a quarter, which is unacceptable. Our DER's (Defensive Efficiency Rating) in the first half was .58 and our DER's for the whole game was a .90 and it also went from pretty good and then hit the wall.
