Dec. 21, 2009

Recap | Final Stats

South Carolina Head Coach Darrin Horn
Opening Statement…
Good to see our guys bounce back, and play the way we want to play. Which, you know as I said after the game the other night, what was most disappointing was how we got out-played in every area. For us that is supposed to start with effort, and really on the defensive end. I think the thing tonight was that we guarded, and we played with great effort. Eventually when the shots started falling, and we got some easy ones we were able to get our confidence going. In a lot of ways this was very similar to the Richmond game. We didn’t play bad in the first half, in fact we were really, really solid defensively. We just didn’t score, and we went down but were stuck with things that we needed to do that make us a good basketball team. Tonight we had a lot of different guys contribute. The freshmen were terrific tonight. I thought Johndre (Jefferson) off the bench gave us good presence, especially defensively. I think without any question that was Devan’s (Downey) best game of the year. Tonight was a night where he really made a difference on both ends of the court. He took care of the basketball and had a two-to-one assist to turnover ratio. We normally don’t care about it being two-to-one because he is a scorer, but he took good shots and distributed the ball. He had seven steals, and a lot of those were just being on the ball, being aggressive. That was good to see, especially headed into break.

On what caused the second half surge…
I think we got a couple of easy ones, and got to the foul line. We got some steals, but we made some shots too. You know there was that stretch in the first half where Brandis (Raley-Ross) and Devan both took 3s from almost identical spots that were great shots, and they just didn’t go in. For example, if both those go in we have I think 34 in the first half. So I think it was a little a bit of we played great defense, and we just made some shots.

On the loss of Dominique Archie…
Well I think the thing about Dominique is that he made us special. I think Dominique gave us a chance to be a special team because he is a special player. He brought us all these special qualities on the floor that we have talked about many times. We started to see signs of that early on. If you go back to our earlier games, and look at the start of the Miami game where we were headed in a real positive direction. So I think that he made us a team that was potentially special. I still think we have a chance to be a really, really good team. Like we have talked about before it just lessens our margin of error. I know it is really boring, but it is true. Just the other night we had nobody step up. You just look down the stat sheet, and you look at effort and it shows up tonight.