University of Minnesota Athletics
Minnesota-Northern Illinois Postgame Quotes
12/16/2009 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Northern Illinois (1-6) at Minnesota (8-3)
Dec. 15, 2009
Williams Arena, Minneapolis
Northern Illinois - 48
Minnesota - 89
Minnesota Head Coach Tubby Smith
On Blake Hoffarber:
"I'm proud of Blake Hoffarber and the shooting exhibition he put on tonight. I'm happy for him that he got a school record. I'm glad somebody on the bench told me, and we were able to get him back in the game. Certainly, he was ready to go in there, and he didn't waste any time, thank goodness. But he's very deserving of it, because he's a young man who's worked his heart out. He's a guy who's always in the gym, he's a gym rat, comes early, stays late, does all the things that we ask him to do on and off the basketball court."
On Northern Illinois:
"Northern Illinois is a team that's coming off its final exams and you can tell that it was a little rusty. But I thought that they kept their composure and played extremely hard. Ricardo Patton is a guy who's been coach of the year before at Colorado, he's a good coach, and he'll have his team playing well. I know, looking at the stats, you wonder how that's going to be, but we've been playing well of late. Our rotations have been working well, we're sharing the basketball. You see we had 24 assists on 34 field goals, and that's a pretty good job of sharing the basketball."
Minnesota Sophomore guard Blake Hoffarber
On his shooting performance:
"I started hitting a couple of shots there, and my teammates were finding me, and I just kind of felt like I couldn't miss there for a little bit. The rim definitely felt a little bigger tonight."
On the team's improvement the last few games:
"I think that after those losses our entire team knew we needed to pick it up and start working harder. We started to do that in practice, and we started to play better offensively, just moving without the ball and trusting in our teammates to make the right play."
Minnesota Senior guard Lawrence Westbrook
On Blake Hoffarber:
"Blake's a great shooter. I'm happy for him that he got the record. He's a good teammate, and he's one of my best friends on the team, so I'm very happy for him."
On whether the team can carry its aggressive play into the Big Ten season:
"Hopefully. We're playing pretty well right now, but we know that the competition level is going to rise starting with Penn State. We've got to focus. We had a little wakeup call earlier when we lost a few tough games, so I think that's going to motivate us."
Northern Illinois Head Coach Ricardo Patton
On Minnesota's performance:
"Well, one of the things I think we sometimes fail to mention is often times the best team wins. Of course, we played a superior team. I think it's the best team we've played all season. They exposed our weaknesses in terms of guys penetrating too deep. We talked about it before the game on penetration. Guys need to get to the rack and dunk, pull up or pass. But guys were penetrating far too deep, getting hung in the air with no one to pass it to, and it developed into turnovers."
On steals and making shots:
"We got our share of steals, but bottom line is they shot the ball much better than we were able to shoot the basketball. We tried to go inside and we didn't come away with a whole lot. Guys just didn't make shots to match the shots that were made on the other end."
On Xavier Silas:
"I thought he held up okay. He struggled putting the ball into the hole. I thought early on he was looking to try to draw the foul and it was a physically played game with calls not being made, and again, not being critical with the officiating -- it was a great officiated game -- but it was just physically played. I thought he was looking too much early on to get calls other than pulling up and taking the shot. I promise you, I'm more concerned with his defense than with his [injured] hand. At this point, his hand looked fine to me."
