Joe Konieczny Quotations

We lost some games early in the season when we didn't knock down free throws when we needed to. It's something we work on in practice every day and try to make it competitive. Tonight, it paid off.

I think they're going to mix in some zone against us, and they're good at it. I think we need to stay with them early. Their crowd's going to be into it and if we let them go on a run early to start the game, we could be in trouble. The longer we can hold off the run, the better our chances will be.

We played a lot of kids and saw a lot kids, normally seven, eight, nine in the rotation, step up with some monster efforts. I thought Justin Smith (11 points) was unbelievable. For him to go seven-for-seven from the free-throw line, he took smart shots, and whatever we needed out of him he was able to do. It could be a different guy on this team every night.

It was a tale of two halves. I thought the last eight to 10 minutes we just didn't match up with them physically. We rely so much on speed and quickness and I thought they did a great job making it a physical ballgame. That's what won it for them because we physically couldn't match up.

That first quarter was huge for us tonight. We came out and scored 24 points and set the tone that this was going to be a good game.

Their 1-3-1 (zone defense) hurt us the first half. We didn't do a good job against it at all. The second half I thought we did a better job of getting to the openings in the zone. They're a good team. Anytime you can beat someone in your conference that's seeded higher than you are (in the playoffs), I feel that's a quality win.

The difference was Frank and the 31 points they scored in the first quarter. He's a nice player. They have extremely good athletes and tonight it was Frank.