Shocky1;842640671 said:
sean miller publicly rips his players after last nite's loss to oregon in tucson...
For those who haven't seen the quotes:
"I've never been more down looking at a team I coached than what I just saw," he said. "Leadership, effort, togetherness, playing for the win. And right now things are going to get worse before they get better and we gotta come to grips with probably two things. One: Sean Miller's your coach and you're going to play for me and number two is you're going to play so hard you can't breathe.
"And if you can't give extraordinary effort for our basketball program, on this team, for this university, we'll put four guys out there. It all starts with that. We started this a long time ago where effort was at the top of the pyramid for us and right now it's not on the pyramid. When that drops everything else goes as well.
"No question some of it is when you get hit with some of the things we've been hit with and no one really cares, it's like you keep going out there at Arizona, like 'Hey, you just keep winning. Doesn't work that way. So we're have a quick turnaround and a really, really tough test on Saturday because we're gonna play a good team in Oregon State and because of the team we are right now a team that's really struggling to find itself. "
Miller was asked if he felt some of the Wildcats' troubles are fixable, or if the team is what it is at this point.
"I don't know," he said. "I don't know."
Even at the beginning of the game, with Arizona making its first eight shots, Miller still found himself a bit uneasy.
"We made a lot of shots. It was a torrid pace," he said. "I don't care who you are.. you're not going to continue to make every shot you take and when we didn't, we needed to get stops, we needed to be a tough defensive team and we weren't.
"We got off to a good start but it's a 40-minute game. Some of the shots we made had very little to do with our offense. As Oregon gets a better feel for what you're doing they're going to take some of your good shots away, force you to move the ball. And as they forced us to do those things.
"They had nine steals. They played very hard. They've got great quickness. We were a disaster. We threw the ball to them on a number of occasions."
Miller was asked if he thought the players may have assumed there would be a comeback at some point.
He paused before answering that one.
"Take this the right way," Miller said. "Don't judge this team like Derrick Williams is on it. Or Sean Elliott. Or Rondae Hollis-Jefferson. Judge our team by the people that are in our locker room when we play. Just because things have happened in the past doesn't mean we can just the jumbotron comes up and the crowd starts going crazy, that we're going to win. That's not the way it works. It's a whole brand new ballgame right now."
Miller was asked if the hardest thing about it was that his message and coaching were not being translated to the team's play.
"Yes," he said.
And, in a follow-up question, he was asked if the leadership was a disappointment, considering the experience level UA has.
"We're a collection right now of guys who are independent and thinking about a lot of things but certainly not thinking about what we're doing or what I'm talking about," Miller said. "Tonight it wasn't about playing for me. I was just over there. It was about just `Let me see if I can make a couple of shots. If it doesn't work out, hopefully coach will leave me alone and move on.' "
When a UA spokesman announced that Miller would answer only one more question, the coach was asked what prompted his outrage at Kaleb Tarczewski.
"This isn't tennis," he said. "This is basketball. There's accountability on offense and defense and you win as a team and you lose as a team. I'll stop right there."
http://tucson.com/sports/blogs/pascoe/article_45985c2a-c657-11e5-ba5c-ef83036b1770.html#.Vqsar4b3cZw.twitterI'll say this, I don't know how this Arizona team is going to respond, but I still don't think I'd like to be OSU right about now . . .
