Jan. 9, 2010
Recap | Box Score | Notes | Photo Gallery 
Notre Dame Men’s Basketball
Notre Dame vs. West Virginia
January 9, 2010
Purcell Pavilion at the Joyce Center – Notre Dame, Ind.
Notre Dame Player Quotes
Luke Harangody – Senior – Forward
On coming out in a man-to-man to start the game…
“They started out with a bunch of guys who could hit from the outside. We just needed to get up on them at the beginning and that’s what we did and why we were able to get this win.”
On the importance of knocking off the eighth-ranked team in the nation…
“It’s a huge win for us. In conference play you need to protect your home floor. We knew that coming in to tonight. We knew that we needed this win. Sitting at 3-1 in the BIG EAST with a week off before Cincinnati is not a bad place to be in right now.”
On if the team focuses on getting ‘resume wins’ at this point of the season… “As of right now I think we are just thinking about where we are sitting in the BIG EAST and what we have to do to place ourselves in the top four of the league.”
Tory Jackson – Senior – Guard
On the importance of the win…
“It’s a good win for us against a top-10 team. It’s a good conference victory and we couldn’t ask for more.”
On being prepared for a tough finish due to the tough start to conference play…
“Coach (Brey) told us with a couple of seconds left that we’ve already been through this and they haven’t. South Florida was the game we went through and it was the previous game. We know the experience and the emotion that is going to be in there. We just kept our poise.”
Ben Hansbrough – Senior – Guard
On if a loss to West Virginia would have hurt the tournament resume…
“Yeah. It’s a loss. We would go from 3-1 in the BIG EAST to .500. Absolutely.”
On if he has ever had nine assists in a half ever…
“At halftime, I don’t know. I broke a lot of assist records in high school but I don’t know. I think the most I ever got was 14 in high school.”
On if the game plan was to look for so many assists…
“It’s just the flow of the game. You have to give credit to Tyrone Nash, Luke Harangody, Tory Jackson and Tim Abromaitis out there finding spots. They really moved well.”
Tyrone Nash – Junior – Forward
On how the previous games helped prepare the team for tonight…
“It was a learning experience. We took something from each game and applied it to this game and it all paid off.”
On closing out a tough game against a highly-ranked team…
“It gives us confidence to show that we can do it and show that we can play defense. It shows that we can be tough physically and mentally. If we know we can do it then we can take that on to the next game and improve for that one.”
West Virginia Head Coach Bob Huggins
On his team’s second half defense…
“We just took out a couple of players. We were supposed to be doing that the whole game; the game plan was to do that the whole game. I thought [Joe] Mazzulla came in and gave us good minutes, put some pressure on the ball. He was probably the biggest difference and then just getting some guys out that weren’t getting it done.”
On the team’s last shot of the game…
“Well the shot we wanted we had the first time when they fouled, and we knew they were going to foul, but Da’Sean (Butler) changed it, which I don’t fault him, I don’t mean that in a bad way. He thought they saw what we were going to do and guard it different. I didn’t have any timeouts left. He’s made shots like that before, it almost went in.”
On his team’s second half offense…
“We got stuck in three’s in the second half, and that’s not us. We don’t need to shoot 37 three’s. We didn’t put any pressure on the rim, we didn’t attack the goal. It’s basically the same group that gave up 39%, but we give up 54% this year. We knew the zone was coming, and I thought we prepared for it pretty well. When you have some guys that are going to play a lot of minutes, and then they get lots of reps, and then they don’t play. Dalton Pepper didn’t get near the reps that some other guys got, and he was certainly the better player today. You just can’t get down to one or two guys.”
West Virginia Player Quotes
Kevin Jones – Sophomore – Forward
On Notre Dame’s success…
“It was just a matter of us not paying attention to the scouting report. They were definitely shooting the ball really well in the first half. They got a lot of easy transition baskets and nobody knew who they were guarding, including me. It was just a lack of focus on our part in the first half, and if we would have played in the first half like we did in the second half, there’s no telling what might have happened. We knew we were in a bad situation down 20 and that’s all we could do was fight our way out of it. We just have to blame it on a bad start.”
Joe Mazzulla – Junior – Guard
On positives to take from the second half improvements…
“You can’t keep going back to that. Obviously we haven’t learned from the Purdue loss for us to come out and put ourselves in a hole like that. So you can try and take the good out of it, but there just wasn’t too much. You can take positives out of negatives when you come out and play to your potential, but when we come out and we don’t play to our caliber and we don’t execute, there are not positives out of negatives.”
Da’Sean Butler – Senior – Forward
On the difference between first and second half play of the team and coming up short…
“I can remember my freshman year when we came up here and played really bad in the first half, came back in the second half and got the last second shot, so [this game] kind of reminded me of that. It’s just the way everything turned out. We didn’t talk a lot on defense, so people ended up wide open. We just didn’t guard the ball and the guy would drive straight to the basket. They had a lot of lay-ups and they knocked down a lot of shots. They shot about 70% in the first half so we weren’t playing defense well. [In the second half] it was just a matter of guys manning up and taking care of business and just playing. We didn’t compete in the first half. In the second half we competed, and if we play like that in the first half I don’t see why we don’t win. They played really well in the first half and held their own in the second.”
On not being able to hit shots at the beginning of the game…
We didn’t really attack the basket or put any pressure on the rim, so that kind of stood out. In the second half, we made a couple, and making them makes you want to make more.”