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Postgame Quotes (Game 30)

March 1, 2018

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GEORGIA TECH HEAD COACH JOSH PASTNER
Opening statement:

“First off, really proud of our guys. Great win. That’s a very well-coached basketball team by coach [Kevin] Keatts and his staff. They have really good players who work hard and are hard to guard. They’re going to be a team that wins multiple games, possibly, in the NCAA Tournament. They beat North Carolina at North Carolina, they beat Duke, and they just rocked Florida State. They’re a good team, so it’s a great win for us. And for us, it just validates that we are getting better and we just haven’t had some wins to validate it. But guys have worked. They’ve put their hardhat on, rolled their sleeves up and gone to work. … We really had a tough, gutty win today where we just found a way to get the W.”

On Georgia Tech’s ball movement:
“Ben [Lammers] had a career-high seven assists, he and Tadric [Jackson] combined for 12 assists and just four turnovers. We’ve been better at cutting and, let me tell you, it’s hard without a true point guard in this league. It’s been hard for us. But Tadric has done a nice job, instead of Josh [Okogie] at the point, we moved Tadric there and he’s done a nice job for us there.”

On Moses Wright and Evan Cole:
“These guys shouldn’t be playing the minutes that they’re playing right now in ACC play. They should be redshirting and being counted on two years down the road. But now everything is expedited and these minutes will pay dividends for Moses and Evan, not only for next year, but also the long term.”

On the McCamish Pavilion crowd:
“I thought the crowd was fantastic. The crowd was once again amazing. They were loud, they were energized. It’s a Thursday night and obviously, we haven’t had the best of years, but for them to come out and be that into it gave us a great lift. I’m really glad that we could validate that for the fans tonight too.”

On Georgia Tech’s perseverance:
“If you look at our team all year long, any time we get down, we always come back. We’ve always found a way. Now, for whatever reason, we get ourselves down, but we always fight back. Or, we’ve had leads, and then we give them away. In the two years I’ve been here, and it’s a credit to the players, that rarely has a lead has gotten high and we haven’t crawled, fought, kicked, whatever we had to do to find our way to get back in the game and give ourselves a chance.”

N.C. STATE HEAD COACH KEVIN KEATTS
Opening Statement:

“Give Georgia Tech a lot of credit. We watched them on tape versus Virginia and Clemson. Certainly, I thought they had the opportunity to win those games on the road. We knew coming in that it would be a tough game because it was a clash of styles. They’re starting to play better basketball after losing their point guard [Jose Alvarado]. It took an adjustment time for those guys to get the right combination on the floor. When you look at the game, I thought we got beat to a lot of 50-50 balls. Anytime you lose a one-possession game you [try to] figure out what happened. I thought both teams were efficient enough offensively, but when it comes down to a three-point loss you look back at it … We had an opportunity [because] we were able to turn them over but I never thought we got the loose balls. We ended up losing a game on the road against a team that’s starting to come together. Obviously, they’re a lot better than their record. They’ve had a lot of injuries. Josh [Pastner] has done a good job of piecing some guys together and they’re starting to play well. Give them credit. Obviously, we’ve got to go back and get better before we play on Saturday.”

On the battle between Georgia Tech’s Ben Lammers and NC State’s Omer Yurtseven:
“I thought both guys were very sharp offensively. I thought both guys scored in the post. It was a good matchup.”

On Torin Dorn’s missed dunk:
“I can’t look at one play and say… I mean I certainly thought it turned the momentum around. I just thought we didn’t get the loose balls that we normally would get. I thought our guys played extremely hard. I thought we played with great effort, but I thought they beat us to a lot of the loose balls. That’s something we’ve got get better at before we play Saturday.”

On the loss snapping a four-game win streak:
“Well it’s the ACC. I think anybody in the ACC, I don’t care who it is, is capable of beating you and you are capable of beating anybody else. I thought they did a great job of protecting their home court.”

On Georgia Tech’s second-half shooting:
“They’re good. Tadric Jackson did a great job. He was able to drive us, but more importantly, I thought he did a great job of posting our guards up, which we knew could happen. The system that they’re running [is] obviously more Princeton-style. It’s a clash of styles when you talk about a team that denies the wings and pressures the basketball. We were able to get the tempo that we wanted getting the game in to the 70s. I just felt like there were some missed opportunities when we didn’t get the loose balls that we could have converted into baskets.”

On the postgame locker-room discussion:
“My message was ‘one game doesn’t define you.’ We’ve been playing great basketball. It’s hard to deny that we’ve won four games in a row and are playing very good basketball. We lost tonight. So what do you do? Do you hold your head down? We don’t have time for that. We’ve got to get ready to play Louisville on Saturday. I told them I was disappointed and that they should be too. We’ve got to get back and got to do what little we can do tomorrow just to get prepared to play a game on Saturday. Whether we won the game or lost the game, we were going to play Saturday. Now we’ve got to figure it out.”

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