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ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE BASKETBALL MEDIA CONFERENCEJanuary 21, 2013Stan JonesSTAN JONES: Well, we're still in that process of trying to identify the identity of this team. Some days we come out, we're extremely energetic and like our old defense, and some nights we're really moving the ball and playing with great continuity on offense, and then other nights we're not. And the nights that we really bring it with some consistency, we're pretty good, and the nights that we struggle to find that consistency, we're not very good. We've got to find our mark here pretty soon and get into some kind of rhythm or the season is going to get away from us. Q. Can you give us an update on Terrance Shannon's situation? Obviously it looked bad Saturday. STAN JONES: Terrance suffered from a sprained neck, and they're still doing some tests to see if there was any bruising to the spinal cord. He's back in Tallahassee, came back yesterday. He's very sore. In regards to his playing status at any point, that still remains to be seen. But he was able to come back yesterday. Coach Williams stayed up there with him and brought him back yesterday after they cleared him from the hospital in Charlottesville. Q. But nothing long‑term physically, though, which is the good news, I guess? STAN JONES: Yes. He was mobile enough to take a commercial flight back, and obviously they have him in a neck brace, and he has a lot of pain, but he has his mobility, and he's not suffering from any tingling or any of that kind of stuff. Right now they want to continue to do some work with the spine specialist here in Tallahassee and see the extent of what the complete damage could be there or if it's just going to be a bruise situation that will heal over time. Q. The inconsistencies that your team has shown, I know there are a lot of new players on this roster, but there are‑‑ there's a good mix of veterans, too. Are they having trouble meshing together or are the veterans maybe not showing as much leadership as you would like, or where do the struggles seem to be taking place that lead to such inconsistency? STAN JONES: Well, you know, we don't have as many veterans as you would hope. Michael Snaer and Okaro White are the only two that really have significant playing time in big ACC games. Terrance Shannon has suffered from a lot of injuries and missed basically the whole season last year. Ian Miller missed 11 games of his freshmen year and a semester last year and then suffered from an injury. So those are‑‑ and then Terry Whisnant was a returning sophomore who didn't play significant minutes as a freshman, only on spot duty. So none of those guys have really had that opportunity to be leaders, and you would want Michael and Okaro to be those guys, but Michael is a guy that plays on energy and competitiveness and kind of needs a point guard out there to kind of help set him up and get him the ball on time and in certain situations coming off certain plays, and Okaro White is an athletic guy that's just emerging. So it's hard for them probably to be in the kind of leadership roles that Tony Douglas was for us for years when we had the same kind of situation because he was a point guard and he could kind of really establish the flow of his team early in the game by getting guys involved and getting the Chris Singletons and the Solomon Alabis on the team involved early and then kind of take over as a scorer when he felt the time was right in the game. With freshman point guards and Ian Miller being hurt and not being able to evolve into a point guard because of his foot injury I think has really hampered our ability to find that consistency, in particular offensively. I think it's hard for a guy like Michael who's a scorer to be that guy when he kind of has to lean on other guys to set him up off of screens and off of penetration and create some opportunities for him. And I think he's tried really hard to be a leader for this team and probably almost to a fault. He's tried too hard at times to be a leader and put a little too much pressure on himself. Q. You were talking about Ian's development as a point guard being held up a little bit by the foot. You've been trying to play two freshmen at point. That's a tough thing for a freshman. Can you talk about how Bookert and Brandon have done in that role? STAN JONES: Well, they've both had moments of being what we needed and they both had times where they've suffered terribly. Devon missed the whole preseason practices. He suffered from a knee injury from a fall he took and had to have a little procedure done on it, and that's actually still‑‑ the skin situation still is in a recovery mode, and now I think it's kind of because he's favored that over the time and missed that conditioning has developed a little bit of a‑‑ I don't know if it's tendonitis or what in the knee that's bothering him a little bit. So that's affected his mobility over the course of the season and not allowed him to play at his maximum quickness. When your wheels are bothering you as a point guard, it's hard to be the player you're capable of being. Montay is a guy that's played the point guard position off and on during his high school career and has developed into it, and it's been a‑‑ as the games have grown with more intensity and more details, that's been a growing process and a learning curve for him, as you add to the playbook and as you add to the defensive assignments that are going to go on. It's just a situation that all young kids say they want when they come out of high school, but sometimes they don't realize the magnitude of it. We don't have any doubt in our confidence that they're going to be significant players in our program right now, but we need them to really escalate their comprehension of what we're trying to do and add some consistency within our team so they become more verbal, they can call a lot of things and make adjustments on automatic situations when teams take certain things away from us because everybody has got each other scouted so well now you have to be able to make adjustments on the fly, and they have to start doing those with confidence. Q. I was also going to ask, your young big men have had some issues lately. With Terrance being questionable, where do you turn‑‑ in terms of big men, you guys have had some struggles on the boards lately. STAN JONES: Yeah, we're not rebounding the ball well, and that's not as much‑‑ totally on our big guys as our perimeter players have not given us a big effort in terms of a blocking out and helping schematically when they've got to come help double‑team, block out on bigs and stuff like that, depending on the offensive things going on with our opponents. There was a big issue in the Carolina game. In the Carolina game our guards got out‑rebounded 23‑6. Our perimeter players as a group only got six rebounds and Carolina has got 23, so the big guys battled on the boards evenly with their big guys. But we do need Boris Bojanovsky with Terrance going to be out here for what looks like an extended period of time. He played extremely well up at Maryland, was a big difference, caused Alex Len some problems being able match up with him and his length, but he's been inconsistent with his effort level playing at the speed of the game that our league requires you to play at, and we need him to go back and look at himself in that Maryland game and try to start being able to recreate that energy. And Michael Ojo is a guy that's really new to the game of basketball, he's made great strides in practice, and even though he got three fouls quickly, he was very physical and aggressive up at Clemson when we won at Clemson. We're going to need him to come in there and gift us some minutes now in terms of fronting the post and rebounding and using his wingspan and stuff to defend the paint a little bit better for us and help us be a little more physical. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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