HD Video: Tom Crean reacts to win at Northwestern

  • 01/20/2013 4:33 pm in

EVANSTON, Ill. — Tom Crean met with the media following Indiana’s 67-59 win over Northwestern on Sunday afternoon.

Watch and listen to his postgame comments in the embedded media player below:

Quotes after the jump.

Tom Crean

On the number of Indiana fans at Northwestern today:

“It was as much of a home-crowd feeling that you can possibly get on the road, there’s no doubt about that. They were outstanding, they were loud, they were vocal, they were really great.”

On the team’s defense today:

“I think one thing that doesn’t get brought very much – we’re in the top 10 in field goal percentage offense, I think would most people wouldn’t be shocked by that, but we’ve been in the top 10 in field goal percentage defense for some time. A lot of times when the nay-sayers start kicking it out and bringing up all of the negatives, they forget to mention that. And it’s important for our guys to understand that and it’s important for our guys to understand that they are pretty good when they really lock into what they need to do. We made some mistakes in the second half with a very hard team to play against. There are a couple basic rules that you have to have, but the problem with a team like Northwestern, they keep coming and coming and coming with the screens. But our defense was really good. We had a couple of different things that we wanted to do today defensively, depending on who is on the floor, and we did it. Our communication was good. But the just keep coming at you and our guys did too. Not only did we defense pretty well, not as great in the second half, but when they bell needed to be answered, we came down and scored three straight buckets.”

On finding a way to win on the road:

“I hope every body understands – that’s three-straight wins on the road. I don’t care where they’re at. When you’re in any league, but especially a league like this and you go out and you find a way to win on the road, that’s a big, big deal. Our guys did it and they deserve it, and they’ve had an excellent week knowing that we have a big week in front of us.”

On Christian Watford and Cody Zeller’s performances:

“Christian really got us going. When we can find a match-up that works when they really can’t defend Christian, we’ve got to ride it as much as we can and we did. It was really important that we never forget that Christian and Cody have got to touch the ball. We had a statistic in the first half where 22 times we got the ball in the paint, we had 29 points. There were five times where we didn’t get the ball in the paint and we only had two points out of that. To me that’s that it is for us. We’ve got to have that. We’ve got to get points out of that. It’s not about who’s getting them, it’s about are we getting in there and are we making plays out of it.”

Filed to: ,