What Kenny Payne, Louisville Players Said After 61-60 Loss vs. Appalachian State

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - The Louisville men's basketball program nearly captured their first win of the season against Appalachian State, but the game-winning layup was waived off, plummeting the Cardinals to 0-3 on the season in the process.

Here's what head coach Kenny Payne, guard Hercy Miller and forward Brandon Huntley-Hatfield had to say following the loss:

Head Coach Kenny Payne

(Opening Statement)

“I thought in the second half we played hard and competed. I see the one stat, we had 18 turnovers and they had 20 points off those 18 turnovers. That is the game. That is the game. The aggressor wins. They came out initially in the first half, they looked like they were Louisville and we were App State, like we were playing on their arena. It cannot happen. There has to be some pride, some toughness about being at home, them coming out and fighting to get wins. That is what this program is built on. The passion that it is to protect your home court, I guess we are learning that. I will take the blame for that. This place is special. This program is special. I need them to understand how special, and not with their words but with they way they fight and the way they play with their togetherness. I thought App State was well-coached. I thought they did some good things. We knew they wanted this game to be an offensive game. We knew we couldn’t allow them to make this an offensive game. By offensive game, I mean you score, I score, you score, I score. We are not comprised of that. We have to a be a good defensive team. If we want to win against anybody, every person who steps on that floor has to be productive. If I knew I would be walking into that game playing without Jae’Lyn (Withers), I would have said it was a loss. But hopefully we live and learn. I know they are really torn up in that locker room. They feel bad. This is what everybody needs to understand, if you watch us practice, you understand what we do. You can’t play games and expect to win and have bad practices. Practices give you the confidence to know that you can go out and beat any and everybody you play against. We shouldn’t have three bad practices before a game and two bad practices before a game and hope you turn on the light switch. There was nothing in our practices that would have indicated that second half the way we played. Nothing. That has to change. If that means we have to practice harder or longer, I guess that is what we have to do. I am hoping that we continue to get better. There are places where we are getting better. I just need them to translate to a game.”

(About the last shot and whether Coach Payne thought it was good)

“I thought it was close. I thought initially that it was good. Then as the refs got together, I could tell there was something. A couple of the coaches said, ‘it’s good, congratulations’ but you have to earn it. I don’t want it to be a fluke. I want to earn it. I really do. I want them to earn it. I want them to walk out of the gym, let’s say we won that game and we go to shake their hands, I want to feel that the other team knows that this is a really good team. I don’t want opponents walking through and shaking our hands feeling like they got away with one. If that makes sense.”

(About fouling with under a minute left was it at the right time and what was the plan)

“Maybe a second or two quicker, we were hoping to get them into a trap and get them into a turnover. We could tell they were a little bit shaky. But at the last second, he made a foul with nine or ten seconds left, but to play it out, it still could have gotten the same basket, just a fraction earlier.”

(About what you need. Are you talking about guys playing with more intensity on defense, rebounding better or attacking the rim offense harder?)

“I'm talking about a little bit of all of it. I'm talking about understanding that the best offensive teams are the best passing teams. How many assists did we have? That means the ball is not moving. That means we're not driving and kicking. That means we're not assisting our teammates. I mean, it's one pass, two passes, and a shot. I want us to have 15 assists. I want us to have 15 assists, 20 assists. I want us to be a great passing team and I want us to move the ball. There were plays in the first half, when constantly we've been preaching from day one, the ball doesn't stick, the ball doesn't stick. You're never going to catch the ball and not know what you're going to do with it. You're never going to catch the ball and take two dribbles and then pass it. That guy passes it up to two dribbles then he throws it to the next guy and he takes two dribbles, it's never going to happen. We don't practice that way. We don't want to play that way. We want the ball to move. We want to move to defenses and then when we do dribble it, we're going north-south, toward the basket, toward the rim. That's what we practice. But for some reason, the emotions of the game, we get in the game and guys refuse to move, it's not just a guy's fault. A guy refuses to move to come up to give him a passing lane, so he dribbles. It’s a bunch of different things, it’s the rebounding. We can't be a bad rebounding team and expect to win. it’s the straight-line drives, keeping the ball in front, we've been working on it for a while now and I'm saying retreat. I don't care how far you retreat, just retreat until he has to make a shot over you. We know what happens if he's around you, he's going to make a shot. So, we've been working on these things. I wish that they could get it and embrace it and do it consistently. I guess we'll just keep doing it and doing it and doing it until they get it and when they do get it, they'll see different results. Let me say this, they deserve to have success. I know they don't at times believe it. They are so young and we don't have a bunch of experience. But we need to have some luck, some success so that we can build on it and it's not about me, it's about them. So, I feel bad for them but I also know I want to deserve a win. I want us to go out and fight and get a win, not something good happens on the last play. There are a million plays that happened before that, that should determine a win or a loss.”

(About how in first half guys were getting a lot of good passing and ball movement but the shots weren't going up until there were six seconds left on the shot clock, four seconds on the shot clock. Are you trying to get the shots off? Did you like the passing there?)

“It's a great point that you just made. One, the ball should never be going around the perimeter and not toward the basket. So, if the ball moves and it hits the other side of the court, then that person needs to get in that lane and create mismatches, create a drive, which defenses collapse, we know they're going to collapse. They’re playing a pack-line defense. We make the extra pass, we can get any shot we want. We can get layups off that, we can get lobs off of that, we can get wide-open threes. I don't want us settling for threes. I don't want to walk in at halftime and 50 percent of our shots are threes. I don't think we're that type of team. We don't practice that way and we're getting better around the basket posting up. We have multiple guys that can post up and that's helping us a little bit but we have to do a better job of making quick passes, moving the ball, getting down into the paint, and creating offense.”

(What did the team do differently in the second half?)

“I just think it’s impossible to create fast break baskets when they are scoring. Danny (Manning) is in my ear, “KP, they’re shooting 65 percent, they’re shooting 68 percent…’ How can we get into transition if we’re giving up that percentage? That’s not who we are, that’s not what we talked about. We talked about how we need this to be a defensive game, not an offensive game. We know what happens if we try to ‘you score, I score.’ We’re going to go on a drought and they’re going to keep scoring. So, for me it’s about the first half, we’ve got to get stops, we’ve got to run good offense, and we’ve got to make sure that we’re taking good shots. If it’s with five seconds on the clock, great. If it’s with 30 seconds left on the clock, great. I just want good shots.”

(On status of Devin Ree, Fabio Basili and Roosevelt Wheeler - are they dinged up or not ready to play?)

“A little of both. Again, I just believe you deserve it. Make me believe that you want it by your practice habits, by what you’re doing every single day. We need somebody to come help us get a win. And the little things matter… whether it’s being on time to tutors, being on time to class. Whether it’s treatment, massage therapy – whatever it is, be on time. When you come to practice, come to practice to fight, not, to not fight. And I’ll reward you when you do that. They’re good kids. I’m waiting on Fabio, I’m waiting on Devin Ree. I need them to help us win, but I’m not going to give it to them, they will earn it.”

(With Jae’Lyn Withers in foul trouble, you played Hercy Miller more in the second half and had more of a smaller lineup – were you happy with the second half offense?)

“I thought Hercy was very good. If Hercy Miller is solid for us, that’s a big win. That’s a big win. If he’s under control and just playing solid, he’s a good defender, he can take the ball out of El [Ellis’] hands and we can mix it up some and make El what he naturally is, a scorer – and that helps us. So, I’m happy with the way he played, I’m proud of him. He’s making strides in his game, he’s getting better. There’s more in there and we’ve got to dig it out. There’s more production in there that he can give us, we will dig it out.”

Guard Hercy Miller

(Can you talk about the emotions during those 10 or 15 seconds when you thought you won the game and then finding out the shot wasn’t off in time?)

Miller: “The emotion on the court was high, we felt like he hit a great shot and that we had enough time. It was something that you don't really know until you review but I felt like emotions were there. We thought we had the game but we just couldn’t do anything about it. We just have to be positive and move on and work on that for the next game.”

(About starting the season with three straight one point losses. What was the mood in the locker room)

“It's been tough, like you said three tough losses we took. One thing about us is that we keep our heads up and try to be positive. One thing we talked about in the locker room is that we have to work hard and work on situations like this in practice, so we don’t have to go through this anymore. So, we'll keep fighting and keep giving our effort in everything that we do. And go 110 percent harder than we are right now.”

(About Kenny (Payne) was just in here and said it hasn’t been the best practices recently. What do you think is the cause of having subpar practices?)

Miller: “I think effort is ultimately the key to our practice. We just have to give effort and everyone has to buy in. I think that's something we're working on. Pretty much, we're a new team. So we're all working together to just to build trust and we're just getting better every day.”

(About shooting seemed to get better coming out of halftime. I was wondering what was said then and were there any change of plans coming into the second half?)

Miller: “One thing we had to highlight was the fact that we weren’t having the best shooting. We shot the same amount of shots from the three as we did in the two for field goal percentage. We had the conversation on how we had to start the first four minutes off strong and go to the rim.”

(With Jae’Lyn (Withers) in foul trouble you played a lot more especially in the second half. What were you trying to give the team offensively?)

Miller: “I'm a person brings a lot of energy and I tried to be a defensive stopper for anyone. That's the one thing I take pride in is defense. I feel like I can guard anyone one through five and I just want to be a player where I bring positivity and energy.”

(About the moment there after El (Ellis) hits that shot where you guys are all in a crowd in the corner but then just to have that taken away from you. How badly does that make you want to have that feeling of getting the win and having it stick the couple of tough losses?)

Miller: “There's definitely a feeling where it's going to stick with us. It could be a good thing and could help us build on what we felt. We don't want to feel that no more and I feel like that's going to make us work a lot harder to where we don't have to be in situations like that anymore. I think that it's a tough loss, but we're going to learn a lot from it. We won’t take it as a loss, we'll take it as a lesson.”

Forward Brandon Huntley-Hatfield

(Just want to get your thoughts on what Coach (Kenny) Payne said to you guys after having that basket called off?)

Huntley-Hatfield: “He’s always telling us we have to change, all of us, we have to look within ourselves and change individually. We can’t keep letting teams punch us in the mouth once the game starts and once we all step on the floor, and then we get down, and then in the second half we’re trying to claw our way back. You see a lot of fight within our team at the end of the game, we have to bring that fight from the beginning, from tip off. That’s pretty much it. We all have to change, play as a team. We have to throw the first punch, so we don’t have to keep digging ourselves out of these holes that we’re putting ourselves in. But I think we’re going to figure it out.”

(About waiting until late in the game to show some urgency instead of showing it from the beginning?)

Huntley-Hatfield: “I think we’re not respecting our opponents coming in. We play a high-level game, we’re D1 athletes. We have to respect everyone that comes into our arena. We are who we are, we’re Louisville. We have to respect everybody. We have to play physical, we have to play fast, and we have to play together, from the jump. They were talking way more than us, they were playing physical, they were playing together as a team. Once they punched us in our mouths, we just got down on ourselves and we let it carry over with turnovers, and some of our elite guys got in foul trouble. We’d go on runs, and then we’d turn the ball over. It has to start on the defensive end with us, and it can’t be a “I score, you score” game, it needs to be you score, and then we stop you. We just have to play with some sense of pride on both ends of the floor, and just respect our opponents, respect everybody.”

(Coach (Kenny Payne) was in here saying that there hasn’t been anything shown in practice the last couple of days that reflected what he saw late in the game with the way you guys were playing, what’s been the cause of the subpar practices recently?)

Huntley-Hatfield : “I think our practices are so hard, sometimes we all come in dreading not to come to practice. Coaches are trying to make the practices harder, so the games will be easier. Now that we’re coming out to these games, and we’re not practicing hard how we would play in the game, now we’ve had to simulate the practices like it’s a real game. Once we get in these tough positions, we know what to do, or we won’t even be in these positions in the first place. We have to take more sense of pride within our team and look within ourselves, and we all individually have to change, and come together and figure it out.”

(Starting the game, it seemed like they were doing a good job of keeping the ball out of the post, and Coach (Kenny) Payne was talking about how he doesn’t want something just out on the perimeter, you’ve got to move downhill. Was there anything you could have done differently during that stretch?)

Huntley-Hatfield: “First of all, with our bigs, screening the screens, and screening hard, and hitting the opposing guards for our guards to get open. I feel like in turn, that will get us open. If we sprint hard into screens, and then sprint out of the screen and fly to the rim, that’s what our coaches are always telling us. That’ll get us open, and that’ll put teams in rotations. For the bigs, just try to get our guards open, setting big body screens, and that’ll get us open. We trust in our guards, all of them, to make the right play, whether that’s hitting us on the short roll, hitting us rolling, or making the right play, making the right pass. It really just starts with us, screening good for our guards, getting them open, and then that gets us open, and we play from there.”

(Photo of Hercy Miller, Kenny Payne: Jamie Rhodes - USA TODAY Sports)

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