Post Game Quotes: Minnesota
2/16/2017 12:00:00 AM | Women's Basketball
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MSU head coach Suzy Merchant
On Branndais Agee's performance tonight…
I think she's really starting to get her confidence back, but she's a kid that has had some injuries early and it's just hard for her to bounce back from some of that stuff. It's hard to get her in shape, and I think she's really committed to that side and getting stronger with her legs. And the minute she starts doing that, she gets to that place she's really effective. She was the one kid that I thought played hard for 40 minutes out of the gate. I thought she brought a lot of good energy on both sides of the ball, early. Some other kids were just out there. I thought late in the second quarter through the third and the fourth we started to wake up a little bit.
On being down late in the second quarter and coming back after the time out was called…
We just talked about effort. Sometimes in this business you have to coach effort, that's usually not a good sign. You need to coach adjustments and whatever they're doing. We talked about being tougher defensively and then moving the ball. We were holding the ball just a little bit too much and we weren't real strong with it. We were playing outside scoring pockets so we really talked about ball movement and trying to trade the gaps in their zone and I thought once we started doing that, playing inside out, that's when shots started falling for us a little bit.
On coming into the second half strong…
Wwe talked about that. I thought we were a little bit flat. I think sometimes that can be the danger when you play somebody twice, and you beat them the first time. Minnesota's a really good team. I think they won three of their last four games, and they've been playing extremely well. And they're good. Kenisha Bell playing downhill was not an easy thing to handle and (Carlie) Wagner can get going at any time. Their post players are big and strong so they had the tools to get some things done. So that's what I talked about at halftime. I said, 'Listen, our energy and our effort has to come out. We have to come out with more pep in our step if we want this game. This is that February fight. You don't want to have to say the word coulda woulda shoulda but didn't.' Those are words you don't want to have to say. I talked about trying to come out with a higher level of energy and a little faster pace.
On Tori Jankoska's triple-double tonight…
As good of an offensive player that she is that just shows you the kind of heart she plays with. Those were a couple of really nice blocks, too. I was waiting for that second one just to be an automatic call because sometimes if they do it once they'll let you get by. But, the second one, not usually. Yeah, she's just has a heart that's bigger than anything I've ever coached. She's just a competitive kid that doesn't really know how tall she is or fast she is or slow she is she just competes and that was a pretty good sequence to watch that happen.
On shutting down Carlie Wagner tonight…
Well, we needed to do a better job… I thought her and Bell the first time that we played them out there we didn't do that good of a job. Bell, I think had 16 on halftime against us. Number one, I thought it was really neat to see Taryn (McCutcheon) grow up. Let me start with Kenisha Bell before I answer your question because that kid, when she gets it going against different teams especially downhill she's just so hard to guard. Taryn took what she learned from that experience, even though we won the game, and she really thought about the game. You could see she was really shading her right side giving her that cushion, when she elevated she tried to get a little bit higher on her hand. That's the difference, she could elevate and Taryn couldn't. I want to give Taryn a lot of credit I think for staying in front of that kid better than she did the first time which I think affected everybody else. Tori was on Carlie quite a bit. I think our big thing with her was that anytime we put her on ball screen we had to do a better job of hedging her toes to the sideline. We would hedge her out there and sometimes she would still be able to come across the middle. She just can play downhill and get you in foul trouble. The other thing I thought we did a better job was challenging her pull-up jumper when she elevated and Tori did a good job with that and Branndais had her a few times and even Lexi (Gussert) as well. I think we just wanted to make her life harder. Especially doing a better job with ball screens and in transition.
On tonight being a "must-win"…
I think they all are. When you get to this time of year you can justify all of them being your must-wins for different reasons but I think everybody's sort of at that point. On the men's side there's kind of the same thing, a grouping of teams based on how they play out there could really adjust them. You could finish ninth or you could finish third, it's one of those things. When you're at home, clearly it's important. Obviously Minnesota is a good RPI team too, so that was important to us to be able to beat them, and now we've got three more to go. Two of them are on the road in tough places to play so we have some work to do for sure.
