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NCAA MEN'S 2ND & 3RD ROUNDS: TULSAMarch 19, 2011Solomon HillSean MillerKevin ParromDerrick WilliamsTULSA, OKLAHOMA THE MODERATOR: Questions for our student-athletes. Q. I know you and Jordan know each other way back from AAU ball and all that. But can you talk about when you first met and just your relationship? DERRICK WILLIAMS: When I first met him we were playing for Team Odom, and we were having our first practices. I didn't really know who he was, I just knew he was ranked really high coming out of high school. In practices, he was just gunning, just shooting everything. He was making a lot of it. But that's just how he is. He has that mentality. He has a killer instinct, and he wants to go for 40 every night. Q. On the same subject, I understand that you played against each other in high school once, traveled with each other some. You spent some time at his house, his mom said. What kind of a kid was he? How strong is your relationship? DERRICK WILLIAMS: Yeah, our relationship is pretty strong. I've known him since ninth grade. We played on the same team throughout high school, and we played each other once in high school. He's a great guy. On the court, he just has a different attitude and different swagger about him than off the court. Most people think he's really cocky just because of the way he acts on the court. But off the court he's a great guy. His family are all great people too as well, from his brothers to his mom and dad. That's what most people don't know about him. He's a great guy all around. Q. Can you talk about MoMo's impact on this basketball team this year, and just an east coast player coming out to Arizona and playing? DERRICK WILLIAMS: Yeah, most people think New York players like Kevin and MoMo are a little tougher. But that's what they bring to our team. They bring that toughness and that swagger about them, and they're the toughest players on the team. And MoMo's been great for us this year filling in for Nic. He's hit a lot of big shots and taken over a lot of games this season when I couldn't, when I get double teamed in the game. So for that point guard to have that take-over role has been really helpful for us this year. Q. Solomon, you've been really excellent defending the three this year. Do you want to talk about the way you game plan for that and what way you're able to really contest shots? SOLOMON HILL: Coming into this game Jordan Hamilton is our primary three-point shooter. He does it coming off screens and transition. Just the key to where finding where he is in transition. We've got to get half back, fullback, get guys on the ball, stopping the ball. Just finding him in transition will be the biggest thing because he's capable of going from 9 to 12 any given night. He's by far their best three-point shooter. Q. Following up on Derrick, talk about that east coast toughness, that New York toughness you have to bring to the court? KEVIN PARROM: Like Derrick said, guys always call me and MoMo the toughest guys on the team. But we're not only the two toughest guys on the team. I think everybody's tough collectively. Me and MoMo just bring the New York swagger to the game, and that's what we've done this season. Q. Talk about how Derrick has embraced that leadership role. Some guys don't like be the guy, and some guys it comes natural to them. How has he adjusted to that? KEVIN PARROM: I think he adjusted well. It started last year after the Wisconsin game. I think guys didn't even know who he was before. But after that game he's really done a great job in that role. He's been great with it ever since. Q. As far as playing Tristan, I'm curious about that match-up from your standpoint. Also, when the first time is you maybe saw him play. I'm wondering if Jordan maybe told you about this young kid they had or just what you think about the match-up? DERRICK WILLIAMS: Yeah, in the off-season when they have recruits coming in, just talking to Jordan, how's the team going? How's the team looking this year? He's one of the first persons that he named. He's really lanky. He has long arms. He can jump out the gym. That's what he brings. He likes to attack the rim. If you're in the way he's going to jump over you and dunk the ball. Offensive rebounds, he's an animal. It's going to be my job to keep him off the boards, because that's where I think he averages like 13 points a game. He gets about 106 them off the offensive rebounds and put backs. So if I can limit his touches and offensive rebounds, because they have a good shot at winning. A lot of it has to do we with just me guarding him and just boxing him out. Q. Jordan mentioned that he would have a few tips, a few pointers to pass along to Tristan as far as guarding you. Anything you'll pass along to your teammates about guarding Jordan? DERRICK WILLIAMS: Only thing I can say to my teammates is hand down, man down. If you don't have a hand up, he's going to shoot it and make it every time. As soon as he makes his first couple, it's going to be a long night if you don't have a hand up. They know what he can do. They've seen the highlights in AAU and even in high school, they've seen what he can do. He's capable of going, like Solomon said, 9 or 12. He can he hit nine threes in a game or two threes in a game. Hopefully we catch him on a bad night and just play good defense on him. Q. Mentally you probably knew what to expect in NCAA Tournament play. But to physically go through the game did you against Memphis, did that prepare you for this next game against Texas? DERRICK WILLIAMS: Yeah, it did. Like Coach told us, the calls are going to be more consistent. The refs are going to be more consistent. They're not going to call the little fouls like that, little hand checks. They're going to call hand checks, but little fouls in the post that maybe during the season were fouls, they aren't going to be fouls. So he's always telling us to just finish strong, finish at the rim and don't worry about the foul calls. If it's a foul, they're going to call it. If it's not, they're not. That game with Memphis really helped us get the feel of the refs on how they're going to call the game. I think with Texas they're not going to be calling a lot of fouls on both sides. It's going to be an aggressive game, and we've just got to match up with them. Q. We talked to Jordan and he said you guys communicate you a lot during the off-season and stuff like that. But this week, he said you're not his friend. How do you feel about him? DERRICK WILLIAMS: Whenever you play a teammate like that, of course we're not friends right now. I'm not going to text him. I'm not going to BBM him tonight or tomorrow. We're not friends right now, just like he said. But after the game, win or lose we're going to be friends after that. But leading up to the game, we're not friends. We're not friends during the game, through the game, it doesn't matter. Right now we're not friends, and that's all I can say about that. But after we'll be the same way we were before. Q. Your thoughts on the game tomorrow? SOLOMON HILL: They have a lot of guys that like to get shots up. And Gary Johnson and Tristan are big guys on the boards. Jordan Hamilton also does it on the offensive side. I think that's how they stay in games. When they played against Kansas, they stayed in that game by rebounding. That's a big thing. We get five guys on the boards and get out in transition. Q. From a defensive overview, many teams you have an inside guy you want to guard, you have an outside guy you want to guard. Texas has four or five guys that can score. What kind of emphasis on total defense does that place? SOLOMON HILL: It's just a team defense. Guys got to stay connected. It can't be more of an individual-type thing. Once guys try to stop their man individually, it kind of takes away from the other four guys on the floor. I think if we all communicate on the floor and really communicate with anticipate other, we can help each other out on the defensive end and try to keep them off the paint, and also the contested threes. That will be a big thing in tomorrow night's game. Q. Did they have as many or more scorers than you usually face? SOLOMON HILL: Yes, they do. They have 7 guys that play heavy. Even Lucas is a spot up three-point shooter. It's just playing those guys heavy. We have a nice ten-man rotation. It's just kind of wear those guys out during the game, and really push the ball and try to get those guys winded. THE MODERATOR: Coach, an opening statement and then questions. COACH MILLER: We're very excited to advance in this tournament. We were obviously part of a great game yesterday, and we feel fortunate to have won the game and moving towards Texas we know we have our hands full. They have earned the right to be one of the best teams in the country. They've done it from start to finish. To me they'll be the most physical team we've played all season long. Two teams in our own conference, UCLA and USC both have front lines, but I think Texas is even bigger and stronger and more able to rebound better than even those two very good teams we've played against. So we're excited about the challenge, but nonetheless I think we all recognize we're going to have to play much better tomorrow than we did last night against Memphis to have a chance to advance. Q. Just how critical is the match-up of Derrick versus Tristan Thompson? And how much do you think that will take place in the game? COACH MILLER: I don't know if it's an individual match-up. I don't know if Tristan Thompson will guard Derrick or Derrick will guard him. But I do think respective to their own teams, both guys are obviously very important. I've watched Tristan as a high school player, and Texas deserves a lot of credit watching his body change the way it has in such a short period of time. It's overwhelming as a coach that's getting ready to play against Texas to watch him offensive rebound. I think he's had as many as ten in a game. He might be the nation's best offensive rebounder. Keeping him off the glass and not allowing him to put fouls on our team is certainly one of the big keys to our game. Derrick on our end is essential that he plays well, and he usually does. Getting a good game from him is going to be paramount to tomorrow's game. Q. I'm curious when a match-up like this when you have guys on both teams have who relationships like Jordan and Derrick do in the past and high school, will you talk to Derrick at all about that and how to handle his emotions about that throughout the game? Just anything about that. COACH MILLER: A little bit. And the good news, and I'm sure it's the same with Jordan, we play in the Pac-10, so we're in California quite a bit. Derrick and a lot of our teams have relationships with players on the other team. The one thing that's so different about today is, I feel like every player on our team knows every player on the other team just because of the way that the travel teams and that's organized. They're playing nationally in the spring, nationally in the summer and sometimes even in the fall. So you have so much familiarity between players that back in the day when I played you didn't even talk to the other team. These guys, they know each other. They've played against each other, and sometimes with each other. But Jordan Hamilton and Derrick Williams have a good relationship, a very strong relationship. Teammates for many, many years. I think Derrick will tell you Jordan was the focal point growing up, and Derrick was kind of his understudy. So from that perspective it's interesting that now both are marquis players at their respective schools. But Derrick's a humble kid. He plays for the win. I don't worry too much about him getting caught up in anything. We like when he's aggressive, and generally when he's aggressive, it's not a bad thing for us. It's a good thing. Q. We know about Derrick's scoring ability and everybody talks about that, but to make that play that he made at the end of the game, how key was that to watching him make a block like that? Is that emblematic of his style? COACH MILLER: You know, Derrick Williams is as clutch of a player as I've ever seen. I mean, timeliness and when he makes plays is remarkable. He's made offensive shots, threes, made one in yesterday's game; clutch free throws, big baskets at huge times in the game. He's also blocked two game winning shots. One in our home game against Washington, which was a big reason we won the Pac-10 regular season championship; and then in yesterday's game off of that missed free throw. He's clutch. One of the things we talk to him about is it would be nice if he'd block a couple during the game before that happens instead of waiting until the very end. He's a terrific player, an even better kid, and as much as his statistics reveal that, his timeliness, his ability to perform at the highest level when it matters most is in a way part of his identity as a player. Q. Do you feel like whether it's you're on the west coast that maybe the program's been overshadowed a little bit coming into this game? And how critical would a win be for the overall growth of your program? COACH MILLER: There is a fine line in answering the question. I can go statistically and say think about four Final Fours, a National Championship, 11 Pac-10, now 12 Pac-10 Championships. We've been in about as many Sweet 16s at Arizona as any program in the history, almost, of this tournament. What Coach Olson has done in the past stands for what it should, and that is remarkable Hall of Fame excellence. Arizona just went through an awkward transition, four coaches in four years, ending here with me. A year ago we were out of the tournament, kind of restarting things. But we're very proud. A year ago we were a program that won 16 games, and we were much closer to winning 12 than 16. We were very proud of what we did last year under the circumstances. That was a springboard for us to be sitting at 28 wins right now. But I feel like we're getting the respect that we deserve, and we'll continue to get the respect when we advance in this tournament. You get respect by not just being here, but winning. That's why Arizona has the stature that we have because of the great success in the past in this tournament. We're hungry to continue it, not only in this round, but in years to come. Q. Do you think that you've been able to thrive under the pressure of that, the program and all of that? I mean, you had to build it up again and you're doing that. COACH MILLER: Yeah, you don't want to be the new coach at Arizona if that bothers you, pressure, in terms of being the one that breaks the NCAA Tournament streak or worrying about can we ever get it back. If that's the case, then I probably shouldn't be up here representing Arizona. Part of what you have to do as a new staff here is believe in who you are and how you do things and understand that we're coaching at a spectacular place. If you're at a home game in McKale Center, there are very few that resemble it. We had a whiteout this year, and when you walked out I don't know if one person from the ushers to the people in the top rows had any other color on but white, and there are 14,500 every game. Tucson is a town of a million people, and yet you look at the sports climate, it's about the University of Arizona and Arizona basketball. From that, we have an incredible product. It's just up to us to restore some of that that was in place for so long. Hopefully we're on our way to doing that. Q. The tragedy in Tucson, if you could talk about how that affected your team, and if you guys rallied as a cause? COACH MILLER: Well, I don't know if our team rallied as much as going back to that weekend when it happened, our reaction would be the same as the rest of the nation. It's hard to believe that something like that can happen on a Saturday morning in Tucson, Arizona. So many people were impacted. Lives were lost and things changed. But we had a game scheduled for that afternoon against Stanford, and when we got the phone call the game was cancelled, rightfully so, and moved to the next day, almost about a 24-hour window. I think all of us began to wonder what the crowd would be like that next day. You could see where no one would come to the game. It was just the opposite. I think at that point it was the biggest crowd of the season. Everybody seemed to want to take their mind off of what happened by watching a great basketball game and cheering on the Arizona Wildcats. It was a reminder to all of us who are a part of the University of Arizona how important our university, and in particular our athletic program is to Tucson. We're in a sense the only show in town. People love to come and enjoy themselves. And I think on that Saturday afternoon, Sunday afternoon, it was a matter of taking their mind off of an unthinkable tragedy. Q. How much more confident are you playing this game in March than say if you had to play Texas, a team of that caliber in say November of this year? COACH MILLER: Well, we have, as you know, a reminder of that because we played Kansas at that time in Las Vegas. We played a great game against Kansas, and I know Kansas has really improved throughout the course of the year and so have we. But to me that was more of a test the waters type of game to see if we could stack up with one of the nation's best, and we did. Had an opportunity to win and they finished us off like they usually do. I do believe we're more ready for this game. I don't know if that's to our advantage. Texas may feel the same way. But playing three games in three days in L.A. in the Pac-10 Tournament was good for us. Playing the type of game we did yesterday was good for us moving forward because so much of this tournament is not making shots as much as being resilient, tough-minded, sticking together when things aren't going well. We really have faced that quite a bit in the last four games that we've played. Having said that, Texas is a terrific team. I watched West Virginia-Kentucky, they're terrific teams. You watch UCLA-Florida. Just the greatness of the NCAA Tournament, everybody's good at this point. It's a matter of who is going to play the best during that game time of 40 minutes. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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