Lady Vols basketball and Louisville traded shots to open up the game in Brooklyn, but it was a complete second-half meltdown for Tennessee. The result was an 89-65 loss in the Shark Beauty Women’s Championship Classic.
After the game, Lady Vols head coach Kim Caldwell met with the media. She was asked about offensive and defensive issues, the play of Talaysia Cooper and more.
Here’s what she said.
More From RTI: Three Quick Takeaways: Lady Vols Fall Apart in the Second Half vs. Louisville in Brooklyn
Opening statement
“We had a terrible display of basketball today. We did a scout, it didn’t look like we did a scout. We didn’t rebound, we got beat to every 50-50 ball. They were leaps and bounds tougher than us today.”
On the balance she wants with Talaysia Cooper as a scorer and defender
“She ran the offense for us a lot last year. I think when she’s on, she’s on. She’s just a very good two-way player for us. She can make a lot happen in our press, and she struggled tonight to see the right play, the right read on the ball screen. We did work on it and I thought she was prepared coming in. And then, you know, she’s a player that has such a high ceiling, you want to have her on the floor. But tonight really wasn’t her night.”
On the event promoting women’s basketball
“It’s a great event. It’s a great time to be in New York with a great crowd. Amazing facility, really, and they treat you well. It’s really good for the game, and that’s why I think this one hurts a little bit extra, because we didn’t represent the game very well today.”
On why there wasn’t much fight in the fourth quarter
“I think that’s all exactly what you saw. We had a couple bad breaks, and then we put our heads down. We worried about things we shouldn’t be worried about. We didn’t take accountability and just say, I’ll fix it. And it kind of melted, and it kind of spread, and then we could never recover. And then it turned into a 24-point loss. And had there been 10 more minutes, it would have probably been 50-point loss.”
On not rebounding well
“I think for us, in the defensive rebound, we tried to make an adjustment at halftime, and didn’t look like it. We weren’t matched up. So when you’re not matched up, you can’t find a body, you can’t find a body, you can’t box them out. That’s part of it. And the other part of it, they just ran right through us about it.”
On if they’re prepared for conference play
“I mean, we have one more game before Christmas, so we have a very quick turnaround. We don’t have a lot of time to sit on this one. We got to go make sure we look a lot better on the next one.”
On turning the ball over in the second half
“I think the majority of it is fixable. The turnovers in the full court, we were prepared for. So those are really disappointed again, we knew it was coming, and we still threw it right to the other team, playing a little bit too fast. And then the ones in the half court again, we repped it. We repped it. We repped it. We repped trapped ball screens. Or repped hedged ball screens,
and we didn’t execute.”
On what needs to change defensively
“I think against the smaller teams, we’re able to just clean up a lot based on size. And when you play these games, and again, it’s why we’re playing them, so we find these problems earlier, our guard defense needs to get a lot better. Our help-side defense needs to get better. We need to take pride in having high hands, winning the two-dribble war, and I still think we take a lot of plays off defensively, because in the non-ranked games, if you will, we’re able to just clean it up at the rim, so we don’t have to sit down and guard. And getting into SEC play, everyone has to do their job.”
On winning the game last year in the event, losing this year
“No, it would have been great to have the same result. It would have been great to get this win going into SEC play, kind of be what propelled us going forward. It would have been a signature win for us. I really hope that this was not our signature today.”
On what she wants the offense to do when drives are cut off
“We want multiple paint touches. So we still don’t really have the discipline to do that. We talk about it, we repeat it over and over and over. We’ll get one paint touch. We’ll see a sliver of the rim, and we’ll throw the ball up at the rim, and then nobody will go get the rebound. We won’t share the ball. And when we do share the ball, and we do cut hard for each other, and we did have some moments, we didn’t hit them. But we did have some moments where people would cut hard for their teammate. When you cut hard, you create that double-wide gap. We got good looks going to the rim. We don’t pass the ball inside out enough. We don’t want one more, the ball, enough. Again, we had some glimpses, but for the majority of it was one pass. Try to jack something up, or we would turn it over.”
On her concern level that they had this result at this point in the season
“This is a terrible result. It’s not a good result. I was really hoping that we would take a big step forward, and I do think we’ve gotten better, it didn’t show. It’s not showing on the board, but in practice, everything is getting better. So we have time after Christmas to fix it. We kind of have to just patch this one together and work on getting a win right before we leave, because again, we have a good opponent. It’s not just a cupcake game. We have to come. We have to get locked in. We got to take care of the business there and then that’s really all I can focus on is our next game, which is going to be pretty quick.”
