Nebraska vs. Miami Postgame Notes and Quotes

Nebraska Postgame Notes
*-Nebraska falls to 5-3 on the season as all three losses have been to ranked teams
*-Nebraska fell to 3-2 all-time in Big Ten/ACC Challenge games, and Miles is now 3-1 at NU in the Big Ten/ACC Challenge
*-Nebraska falls to 2-2 in overtime games under Tim Miles and is now 1-1 in OT games at Pinnacle Bank Arena.
*-Shavon Shields’ 28 points was a season high for a Husker and his 16th career 20-point game. He moved past Larry Florence for 16th on NU’s career scoring chart tonight. Shields now has 1249 career points.
*-Jake Hammond blocked a career-high four shots tonight. Prior to tonight, he had three blocks in 2014-15

Nebraska Coach Tim Miles Quotes

On Shavon Shields’ health
“Well, he got kicked on a play and he ended up cramping up. He’ll be all right. He’ll just be really sore tomorrow. After a slow start, I thought he was terrific. He did a lot of good things. Unfortunately, I maybe shouldn’t have had him out there at the end, because (Davon) Reed hit the 3, his first one all night, but we thought we had him on a good matchup. I could’ve maybe tried to burn a timeout, but he’s not going to get a heck of a lot healthier in a minute-and-a-half.”

On Shields’ performance
“Shavon’s as good a player as I think there is in the Big Ten. He only played 20 minutes against Cincinnati, but when he was on the floor there, I thought he was the best player on the floor. I thought tonight, he was as good as anybody on the floor, maybe better and that’s a top-notch ACC team, I would imagine. I think that he’s just developing and growing into a better and better player.”

On if he was happy with the Huskers outscoring Miami in the paint
“Well, I’m not happy with anything, but we had to be in the paint. They took away a lot of things. We still made some 3’s, but you can see their activity level, I thought, was good. I thought defensively, Coach Larrañaga had them locked in. He had them everywhere. They defended us right, they gave a lot of help on good guys. I don’t think I got Andrew (White III) enough shots. I probably should’ve tried to get him more. I tried to give him a few more, but it just didn’t happen. I thought Glynn Watson Jr. was really good early getting us some points and doing some good things, but we had to run a lot of actions tonight and not much motion, just because they took away so much space on the floor with their length and athleticism.”

On getting Andrew White III more shots
“Well, that opens up a lot of things for a guy like Shavon Shields, so there’s some give-and-take there. I think we just need to put packages in for him and stay creative and random, so to speak. You can’t get too predictable. These guys won’t let you.”

On if the team is doing anything better than he expected
“I don’t want to be ‘The Little Engine That Could.’ I don’t want to be that program, and I don’t mean to be relentless on these guys or whatever it might be, but we had some freshmen that have got to get in the fight. That was a fistfight so to speak. When you go in that alley, you’ve got to go in ready to go. I thought we had a couple of young guys tonight that weren’t quite there mentally, weren’t quite there physically. It was moving pretty fast for them. Hopefully they’ll be able to adjust the next time that happens.”

Nebraska Junior Guard Andrew White III
On how Shavon played tonight
“I thought he played a really great game. Obviously he carried our team, and that just shows you that big players make big plays and that’s what he did. When you get in games like this, teams are so well scouted that most teams know what your sets are, they know what your tendencies are, so at that point you just have to have guys that can go and make plays and I think he did a good job of that tonight. He tweaked his ankle or something like that late in the game and it was unfortunate to see him kind of slow down his step, but he carried us big time tonight.”

On how the defense stiffened to send it into overtime
“At that point, you’re just trying to stop the ball from going in the hoop, and our timeouts, we weren’t talking a whole lot of strategy. At that point you know it’s just a man-to-man, stop your man from scoring and get the rebound. When you have the momentum of the crowd and the big moment, everybody knows what they have to do. We’ve been trained really well up to this point so everyone knew what positions they need to be in, what our defensive assignment was, it was just a matter of everybody executing and everybody stopping the ball from going in the hoop.”

On how facing a talented team like Miami can help the team down the road
“They definitely made some athletic plays on both ends of the court. You kind of get used to it when you play high D-1 basketball, you’re going to face athletes and some of our earlier games this year, they weren’t quite as talented, but we did face some athletes and some length…It helps you a lot, just when you play against talented guys. That’s more of the thing than their athleticism, just guys who can play.”

On if they’re still to the point where they’re satisfied with moral victories
“No, Coach Miles came in disappointed. This is not a situation where we’re necessarily happy for the effort or we walk out of here happy that we just hung with Miami. I think everybody here expects to win and this game and the Cincinnati game, those were such close games. It’s unfortunate because that’s how it works out in basketball sometimes.”

Nebraska Freshman Guard Glynn Watson Jr.
On how facing a talented team like Miami can help the team down the road
“I didn’t really think about it that much. I just tried to come out and play my game. They changed some of my shots, but it was nothing in my mindset to change my game up.”

Miami Head Coach Jim Larrañaga

On the battle between two historic programs…
“Two great leagues, battling. For us, we represent the ACC. To go on the road and win in overtime is a tremendous accomplishment. This is my fifth year in the ACC. We’re 3-2, but this is our first road victory in the ACC/Big Ten challenge. So we’re thrilled to get the victory tonight.”

On Nebraska shooting it well against them…

“Everybody’s shooting it well against us. I mean, those three’s that they hit in the first half, at the buzzer… the shot clock was going off and they’d launch. We played great defense for 29.5 seconds and they’d get three points still. That’s something we’re working on. That’s something we’re working on. We need to get better at it. I think we will, but we have to have a little better sense of urgency. We changed our starting lineup so that we get, maybe, our best front court defender on (Shavon) Shields and he still just torched us. We know we have a lot of work to do. At least I know we have more to do. I’m not sure the players know.”

On his impression of Shavon Shields’ performance tonight…
“He was great. One of the things about coming to Nebraska, and I’m not sure you guys know, but Shawn Eichorst, the athletic director at Nebraska, and Steve Waterfield, his associate or deputy athletic director, they were the guys – Shawn hired me and then I worked very closely with Steve and I have great respect for them and the job that they do. It was important to me that we come in here and represent our program. They hired me to do a good job. I want them to be proud of the job that we are doing (at Miami). Shields was a guy we, basically, pinpointed and said, ‘This may be the key to the game.’ and he ends up 11-of-25 from the field and scored 28 points. Basically, since the season began, we have not been able to stop a guy from having a great game. Whoever the leading scorer is, he has his best game against us. So we’ve got to go back to the drawing board and figure out what we’re not doing and make an adjustment in our defense to just do it better.” 

On his thoughts of Sheldon McClellan’s work on guarding Andrew White III…
“Sheldon McClellan is terrific. He’s an NBA first round draft pick. His defense, last year, was inconsistent. He’s been absolutely terrific from the time… he’s been so focused on both ends of the cou rt. I don’t know how many points he ended up with, but he was 3-of-8 from the field, 1-of-2 from three and he went 7-of-9 from the foul line; 14 points. His work on Andrew White… Andrew was 4-of-8 (on the field), 1-of-4 from the three and ended up with 13 points, so they kind of negated each other. We know Andrew very well. His sister went to George Mason. We recruited him very hard when I was the head coach at George Mason. I got to know his Dad very well and Andrew very well. They came to our George Mason games and spent a lot of time in our gym, so we knew exactly who he was and what he was capable of doing.”

On his overall impression of Nebraska…
“Well, first, watching them on tape, they’re dripple-drive offense is very, very effective. They’ve got a number of different guys, options. They can put the ball on the ground and get to the rim. (Tai) Webster is really good at it. (Glynn) Watson (Jr.) is good. (Benny) Parker is very good of getting in there and then kicking it out to someone. The guy that’s a monster is Shields, who… he’s like a guard, but he’s like their four man. We normally start Ivan Cruz Uceda, but he’s 6-10 and normally guards post players and I didn’t want him trying to guard that guy and getting in foul trouble and putting Shields on the foul line.” 

Miami Senior Guard Angel Rodriguez
On what kind of work the players have to do to get better…
“The bottom line… we got to get stops. Like coach said, we haven’t been able to stop the best player on everybody we’ve played so far, but the good thing is it’s early in the season. We’re going to have a lot of games ahead and a lot of practices, so hopefully we get it right.”

On what overtime games do for teams…
“I think it’s great for the team, in general. You know, the first couple of games we really didn’t face adversity and the last game we faced some and came up short. Coming into this game, we knew that it was not going to be easy for us. We knew it was going to come down to the wire and it did, it went to overtime. I’m proud of our guys that we stayed together. We did everything that we had to do to win a game, whether it was pretty or not, I’m not quite sure, honestly. I’m just happy we won.”