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ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE WOMEN'S BASKETBALL TOURNAMENTMarch 1, 2018MaChelle JosephFrancesca PanGreensboro, North Carolina Virginia 60, Georgia Tech 58 MaCHELLE JOSEPH: It's a tough game for us to lose because we led 95 percent of the game. I thought that Francesca Pan carried us offensively; when she needed some help, we weren't able to get anyone to step up and make plays to help her. But I thought that their players stepped up. Dominique Toussaint hit a big three with two seconds left on the shot clock that really broke our backs with a 9-point lead, and they hit back-to-back threes and that really changed the momentum of the game. Even though we got stops after that, we weren't able to connect on the offensive end. Q. You played yesterday. They didn't. How much of a factor was fatigue, particularly in the fourth quarter? MaCHELLE JOSEPH: Well, we don't make excuses. I really don't think that we can sit here and say we were tired. I just think they made bigger plays than us when it counted, and that's been one of our problems all year long. You know, we needed someone else to step up and make a play offensively, like I said earlier. I definitely don't think I can blame it on fatigue because our kids are well conditioned. You know, we're in the moment and we were playing extremely hard, but I thought that when we got out of the press, we made that defensive adjustment, they didn't make another field goal for five minutes. We did a great job of getting stops. We just again, we've got to score on the offensive end. Q. You played incredibly hard all game long and you obviously had a ton of intensity throughout the entire game. What happened in the last few minutes of the game that caused you to guys to kind of? MaCHELLE JOSEPH: Well, I didn't think we broke down like I said defensively we were still getting stops. We just didn't score. That's what it came down to. We had a couple shot clock violations; a ball ended up in the wrong person's hand. I have to give Virginia a lot of credit. I thought that the week they had to prepare for us, they did a lot of things to take away our sets, like trapping our elbows. We score a lot in the middle third of the floor, and they took that away by trapping the elbows. They were trapping Pan. I thought they were very physical with her. She didn't take a shot or catch the ball without two or three people bumping her every single time she moved. So I thought they did a really good job of being physical with her, and they took away a lot of our sets, like I mentioned earlier, and I'll be honest, Felicia changes the game. I mean, her 6-9, standing in there, there's not a lot of shots we can get in the paint. We're a team that scores, 75 percent of our points in the paint, so that's really tough for us to adjust to. Q. Down the stretch both teams were using as much of the shot clock they could and Virginia was getting scores off the end of the shot clock and you weren't. What do you think was going on there? MaCHELLE JOSEPH: Well, I don't know that Virginia scored a lot of points, like field goals at the end. They got from free throws but I'm not sure that they scored a lot of field goals at the end, and we definitely didn't. We ran our sets and if they did, they were taken away; they figured out what we were running. They took away the entry pass and a freshman point guard, she wasn't able to pull it out and run a different set. She went ahead and ran it to the opposite side which took the ball away from Francesca Pan. So that's what resulted in the shot clock violation. Q. This seems like such a tight-knit group of players. How tight are you guys, and what does this mean for the future for you guys? MaCHELLE JOSEPH: Well, first of all, I have to give credit, a lot of credit to Atonia Peresson and Imani Tilford forward and Breanna Brown, three of our seniors, because they have been the most unselfish seniors that I've ever coached in 15 years. They have played whatever role we asked them to play. They have been tremendous leaders. They compete every day. They kind of set the tone for losing yourself to the team, and I think in the month of February, we found ourselves as a team because of that. You know, obviously our underclassmen are tremendous competitors. They have carried us throughout the course of the season. Obviously Francesca Pan is in my opinion is one of the Top-10 players in the ACC, and I think Lorela Cubaj has developed herself into one of the top freshman post players; and Kierra Fletcher is obviously one of the top freshmen in the ACC. We are very excited about the future of this program. I mean, this season is not over. We're planning to play the postseason and WNIT. But you know, looking forward in the future, we're bringing two McDonald's All-Americans to go along with these two players, a Top-10 recruiting class in the country. We'll have five new players, plus two players we red shirt, so we'll have seven new players next year. Two of them are already with the team and are going to be really instrumental in our success. So the future is very, very bright. Obviously that doesn't make anybody feel better today. But you know, it's one of those things where you know, our leading scorers are, our leading rebounders are freshmen and sophomores, so that gets us excited about moving forward. FRANCESCA PAN: I agree in what Coach just said. In this last month, we came together, we found ourselves and we were playing our best basketball. As she says, we have two McDonald's players coming to the team and our future is bright. Like now, of course, we are not that happy but we need to focus and going into the WNIT get closer and prepare ourselves for next year. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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