UVA basketball coach Tony Bennett talks with reporters after the second-ranked Cavs defeated Florida State, 51-41, on Sunday.
On the hard-fought win: “It sure was hard-fought. We talked before the game that who ever wants this will get it. It’s the time of year when it’s more about the effort, whether you’re the road team or the home team. And they wanted it, especially in the first half. But, I thought our guys just found a way. When London [Perrantes] went out and Malcolm [Brogdon] for a bit, we challenged the rest of our guys to dig down deep. And I thought we won it with our defense, and not our free-throw shooting. There were enough stops and it was what we had to do. I thought our guys responded well in a tough situation. And the crowd was, once again, special.
On flashback to last year when Joe Harris got a concussion: “I forgot about that, but that was the first game of the ACC last year. When you see the two guys that are arguably very significant for our success and have done a good job, both go down it’s not good. I don’t know yet, I saw London’s nose and it didn’t look like where it should be. I assume he broke his nose, but we don’t know for sure yet. They will do the x-rays and look at that, but it was a hard collision. I don’t know if they stitched up Malcolm, but he came back out. It was just one of those games. It was, as we like to say, a blue-collar affair.”
On Xavier Rathan-Mayes and player assignments in the second half: “You can see that if he [Rathan-Mayes] gets a clean look he has a great chance of scoring. I thought we did a better job in the second half on him, except for right after Malcolm [Brogdon] came back out after his stitches and he put his hand down and he made a shot. I thought we did a good job of shadowing him off the ball screen. Most of the time it was Darion [Atkins] or Anthony [Gill] who really stayed with him and tried to force him to go away from the hoop or get it out of his hands. Then we would try to really dig down and get hands in and contest the shots. We wouldn’t give them too many uncontested looks. There was a stretch where they got some offensive rebounds, but it was a hard-fought game. I know it wasn’t pretty, but you have to do what you have to do and the boys really rallied today.”
On Darion Atkins: “We were having a hard time getting the ball inside. I thought Florida State did a really good job. They were fronting the post or three-quartering it, so we couldn’t quite get it inside. But over the course of the game, our guys started to loosen up a bit so we could make some passes inside. We told our bigs to step off the lane a little more to get a catch. We needed to get it inside during that stretch and have someone make some plays like Anthony [Gill] and Darion [Atkins] did. Darion [Atkins] was trying to pivot, spin and lift them up and those were huge plays. Then on the other end defensively, I thought he was really good.”
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