• 9 months ago
UW coach Mike Hopkins spoke about getting up for big opponents.
Transcript
00:00 But before you got here, this program had trouble beating UCLA and Gonzaga.
00:05 And you've now beaten both here, Seattle in the same year,
00:08 which is a pretty big breakthrough.
00:10 Is there some kind of statement behind that?
00:12 >> I don't know, they're such great programs and that's who you,
00:16 when you're in college basketball, you have programs that are upper echelon.
00:21 And you obviously get up for them, and they're good for a reason.
00:25 They got really good coaches, they got great home court environments, and
00:29 they got really good teams and tradition.
00:31 And they beat us nine times in a row.
00:35 We've got competitive kids, we take a lot of pride in how we play.
00:39 And Coach Cronin, at his last press conference at USC,
00:44 talked about how it was gonna be a fist fight.
00:46 Like the team that usually wins the fight usually wins the game.
00:49 And we just kept talking about that, like this is gonna be a fight.
00:54 And we talked about turnovers and rebounding.
00:57 And we had six turnovers and we out-rebounded them.
01:01 All the other stuff, making shots is a bonus.
01:04 But in the areas of toughness, and
01:06 I think in our first game, they had 27 points off our 19 turnovers.
01:11 So every four possessions, 25% of our possessions were turnovers.
01:16 And they were leading to baskets.
01:17 And today we were really more calm, we were more poised.
01:21 Shot selection wasn't great, but our passes, our unselfishness,
01:25 our execution was way better.