Sean Miller Quotations

We're going to try our best to provide as much help to the guy guarding him on that area of the floor. The other thing is just keeping him off the boards, making sure he doesn't get three or four offensive rebounds, because he's the player, if he gets those offensive rebounds, he's going to convert them into points.

We're going to have to do that (rebounding) more collectively. We were like that anyway, but we had a little bit more room for error.

We were at the low end of the ACC, and our big guy got hurt. We ended up winning nine of the last 11 and were within four minutes of winning the ACC championship. On offense, we became a very unique team to play against, and we had a lot of different guys make shots. Sometimes when you play without a big man, it's tough on the other team. They have to adjust to you.

One of the keys to us is sometimes we have some great baskets and have a real good pace to how we play on offense, and then it seems to slow down. When the offense goes into one of those droughts, we're not moving it up the floor. Not necessarily quick shooting, but just the pace. We're always better when we have a quicker pace. ... Brian (Thornton) being able to run, and Brandon Cole or Will (Caudle) being able to run when Brian's out. ... Make or miss on their end, we want to be able to get the ball up the court.

One of the easiest jobs you have in this town right now is under the eight-minute mark, being a perimeter player on our team. You're going to get an open shot, and you're going to have to step in, because Brian Thornton has established himself as such a presence that teams are going to make choices to take him out of it. As they do, we're at that next step - 'You're going to shoot it.' So that's what we have to work through.

He embarrassed our university, our program, his family and himself.

Guys came in with a lot of energy. I was surprised with a couple players. They came ready to battle.

He's going to have to figure out what keeps him from getting 21 in the second half, too. In no way does that diminish his game. I thought he played a terrific game. He only had one turnover and especially in the first half, I thought he was the difference-maker. But man, when you see a guy play like that, everyone wonders, can we get that in the second half, too?

I would use the word alarming. We're a team that practices very well and hard, and we pass the ball well, and we've shown we can rebound. Through nine games, we all have to take a hard look at what we need to do to shore that up. If we could shore that up, we'd have a terrific team.

It always get everybody's attention when you get up at 5:15 and have to get taped and then go (practice) for an hour and a half. We'll keep doing that until we get a commitment to get after loose balls. We're a team that's going to have to beat you with sheer numbers. We need eight or nine guys getting after it. When we have a couple guys going their own separate ways and we turn the ball over and not get after rebounds, we'll have a hard time beating anybody.

It gets everybody's attention when you get up at 5 a.m.. We'll keep doing that till we get a commitment to get on the floor, to get loose balls, to do the things we need to. ... We have to figure out where we stand. I'm not trying to have a boot camp. For us at Xavier right now, we have to determine who needs to start and who needs to play minutes.

Recently against us, if you're that guy that can't make a 3, you usually knock a few down. It was good to see that percentage come our way.

Looking at his development, he could really make our team much different down the stretch.

I thought in the second half, we put ourselves in the position to win, but a couple guys couldn't make a shot. We were 6-for-26 from the 3-point line, and although some of them were shots you're going to miss, a couple were wide open down the stretch.

We have a lot of problems as a basketball team.

We need to find out how we can become the team we were for so long. Looking at it from this perspective, it's not like we're going in at 6 a.m. and playing football or doing anything crazy.

We did some good things today, and we had several players really step up, which is what we need now. It's not one player replacing a player that goes down. It's a collective group. Offensively, you can see that we can be hard to guard.

You lose your confidence when the shot doesn't go in. He seemed to really regain it in the second half, and I hope he keeps it all season. Sometimes you just need one to go in to make that hoop bigger.

We knew we had no choice but to come together or it's going to get worse. When you lose four out of five games and you go through what we went through, the best way to get an identity back is to make things hard. I thought our team really responded.

Everything we're doing right now, we're at the beginning stages. As much as you try to reinvent who you are and give your team the best chance to win, the most important thing is that we're in mid-February and we've played 21 games and had 80-some practices with the same intent, the same player and the same system. The last thing you want to do is put a team on the floor that's thinking their way through things. We're trying to keep things simple.

A lot of broking in money markets is screen trading, where you're putting numbers into a computer. That can't happen with us. There are too many external factors, like dates changing. It is a personal business. You provide the social interface between companies and clients - you're dealing with people's emotions. You need to have a feel for what someone wants to do. It's almost like delving into their psychology.

A lot of these people don't know how to get online or don't have computers. So I'm just doing my part to help out.

It's one of the keys to our team. These last 10 games being able to get him to the point where he's going to take that open one and make it.

It's a very dangerous game. It reminds me of Eastern Kentucky. We all knew before we played Eastern Kentucky with only one day's rest that it would be a hard-fought, tough game. That's what happened. Sunday's game is going to be more of the same. It's going to be a tough game.

It's become a mental thing for him. Unfortunately for Dedrick, and I really mean this, he's not going to get near the credit he deserves for improving in a lot of the other areas of his game. I've never seen him more in control of our team. He's more sure with his ball handling. When's the last time you saw that really bad turnover? Defensively he's been terrific.

Not because the coach changed his mind, but because looking at these past two days, those five guys have done a great job. Their attitude has been very good. We've put our players to the test defensively, and just looking at them working together, they're the five guys that should start based on those two days. If it would be any other way, we would make a change.

They chose to guard Stanley Burrell and really tried to take him out of the game. The silver lining is when you do that, you open the floodgates for some other players.

It's not about us going into a laboratory fixing a bunch of different problems as much as it is rekindling what made us good a short time ago. ... We've been able to do that. It's only been a couple days, but our team has done a very good job.

He's the ultimate warrior. To see him give that effort, with his eye and the condition it was in, it really says a lot about him as a kid.

If I appear to be a little bit frustrated, I am. Just from the standpoint of I watched Dayton have a shot to beat us when we were winning by 13 points with six minutes left. And we went nine minutes again without scoring a field goal.