You don't ever want to get down against a good team. It takes too much emotional and physical energy to dig out of a big hole like that. And like you said, the first quarter was the whole ballgame.
We went with a little different starting lineup and we were a little out of rhythm to start. We are usually a pretty quick-starting team. Once we got on a roll with our transition game the defense picked up a little bit, too. Everybody has a little more fun when the ball starts going in the basket.
You have to come out and play. It's the postseason. Everyone is going to come out with more energy than they normally do. If you want to be in the second round, you have to be ready to take someone's best punch. Until we got knocked down a couple of times, we didn't get the picture that we had to step up and play.
They're both big-time competitors. They're tough. They're hard-nosed. They wanted to put the team on their backs. They had the will to create things and the shoulders broad enough to take shots and make big plays. They're not afraid of that at all.
We spread it around tonight and that's the way I like it. We tried to get everybody plenty of time.
Defensively, we started allowing open looks from 3 and if you let good varsity basketball players get their feet set, they're going to make that shot.
Like letting a bull of a chute, wasn't it? I was trying to slow them down, but you can't hold those guys back. They practice hard all the time and when they get in there, you have to let them go.
They went to a zone, and we lost a little focus and struggled to execute. When we did execute, shots didn't fall. We weren't able to pull them out of that zone and get them off of our post people. We didn't make our 3s.
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