Quick Hits: Okonkwo's Strange Injury, Bad Defense, Elite Shooting + More
Overall thoughts on the team so far
"We can make shots. I think we'll be able to stretch defenses if they can continue to shoot it the way they've been shooting it. Sean [McNeil] and Taz [Sherman] in particular but JB [Jalen Bridges] has shot it very well. That's three guys on the perimeter and Isaiah [Cottrell] has shot it really, really well.
Isaiah Cottrell's rehab
"I was really surprised this summer. I thought he would be real ginger with it but I mean, he was out there running up and down playing and jumping. He hasn't shown any signs of favoring the other leg. He's been from the beginning ready to go. He's shot the ball really well from the perimeter and I mean really shot it well. He shot a couple yesterday that didn't move the net. He's got to rebound it better and do some other things but I mean, offensively, he's really shot the ball."
If it's better for Taz Sherman and Sean McNeil on the floor together
"The hard thing is having both of them on the floor and getting into foul trouble. That's my biggest fear. You'd kind of like to have one of them to be able to come off the bench and make shots for you but they both obviously deserve to start. Honestly, I think we can put five guys out there that can all make shots if we played Isaiah [Cottrell] and JB [Jalen Bridges] up front. I went back and looked at our last five or six games and JB ended up playing a lot of four anyways and he's a lot bigger and stronger now than he was a year ago."
If this is a team rebounding type of team without Derek Culver
"It's going to have to be."
How the team is defensively
"We suck. We don't guard very well. We're putting a lot of time in trying to guard the ball and trying to do a better job of guarding without fouling. We don't make rotations the way we need to. We still have a tendency to stand and watch. If you're going to make good rotations and you're going to be a good defensive team, everything has got to be so reactive. We're turning our head seeing where the ball is rather than making the rotation that we need to make."
Rim protection
"[DC] has been pretty good once we got him moving a little bit. He needed an infusion of, I wouldn't call it encouragement. I don't think he took it that way. But he's done a great job. Pauly [Paulicap] is not as big but he's bouncy. Seny [N'diaye] is getting better defensively. He still struggles offensively."
James Okonkwo's injury
"Honestly, I don't know what to tell you. It's neither [a break of fracture]. Some people I guess, those two bones, it's not that they've grown together, they work there together. What happened was he stepped on somebody's foot, it turned, and it just broke apart. They're not broken but they're apart and they were together from the time he was born. I don't know what you do to fix it. I mean, we can't glue it back together obviously. In the beginning, they said 5-6 weeks it would heal. But I don't know what that means."
If Okonkwo's injury affects the plan to play him vs redshirt him
"The way he was playing before he got hurt, he was going to play. He's quicker off the floor than our other guys. The plan all along was to redshirt him. That's what his dad wants and that was kind of his mindset going in. He shocked me. He was a lot better than what I saw on film."
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