Knight Holds Court
March 23, 2005 08:52 PM | General
March 23, 2005
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. -- Bob Knight may not have cracked out a whip or gave another version of his game face, but Wednesday’s afternoon press conference at The Pit in Albuquerque, N.M., a day before Thursday’s NCAA tournament game against West Virginia had its moments.
 |
||
| Texas Tech coach Bob Knight watches his team practice Wednesday afternoon at The Pit.
AP Photo |
The longtime coach opened the press conference by complimenting the moderator, calling him a tough SOB and asking if he was willing to come back to Texas with him. Knight also got on St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bernie Miklasz and after complimenting John Beilein’s West Virginia team, he playfully finished by getting a dig in at the writers.
“I throw that out to you guys because you’d probably not recognize that. I’ve turned over a new leaf by trying to help the press,” he joked.
In between, a relaxed Knight talked about his Texas Tech team’s run to the NCAA “Sweet 16” after being picked to finish no higher than seventh in the Big 12 preseason media poll.
“I was kind of going through some things this morning that we had put up into our locker room way back in October,” said Knight. “No one had picked this team of ours any higher than seventh in the Big 12. Not one single person had picked them to go to the NCAA tournament. That may show a lot of things about the people that pick finishes.”
Knight has his third Red Raider team playing in the tournament and his 27th overall.
“I don’t think you all appreciate what it is getting into this tournament,” Knight said. “That is the first part of the equation and really the most important and maybe the most enjoyable part except for maybe the one team that ends up winning the tournament. Seeing a team get into this tournament is a culmination of a lot of work on the part of an awful lot of people. I think whatever you can do from that point on just adds something to it.”
Knight has done very little ‘adding’ recently. Several of his Indiana teams were knocked out in the first round of the tournament and he is making his first appearance in the “Sweet 16” since leading IU there in 1994.
“I think we had teams that got into the tournament that probably had to give their last gasp of energy just to get there,” he said. “We went for five or six years getting into the NCAA tournament and winning the opening round game two or three times and getting beat four or five times and that was all done without a kid that ever really played in the NBA.”
Knight’s Texas Tech team is perimeter oriented with its top two scorers being 6-foot-2-inch senior Ronald Ross and 6-foot-1 sophomore Jarrius Jackson. Ross, a former walk-on, is averaging 17.6 points per game and has drawn high praise from Knight for his perseverance and dedication.
“For as long as I’ve coached I think he’d be my all-time example of a kid with no complaints, a tremendous desire to simply be the best that he could be and get the most out of what he had,” Knight said of Ross.
Jackson averages 15.5 points per game.
Six-foot-five freshman Martin Zeno averages 12.8 points and 6-foot-8 senior forward Devonne Giles averages 11.3 points and 6.6 points per game.
Texas Tech (22-10) has won four of its last five games including wins over UCLA and Gonzaga to reach the round of 16. However, Texas Tech has endured some blowout losses this year by 30 to Iowa, by 13 at Iowa State, by 29 at Oklahoma State and by 18 at Texas A&M.
“The biggest negative with our team is on occasion have not played very well, either in a half or a couple of times in games and that has put us in a position where it was almost an insurmountable thing for us to be able to win a game,” Knight said. “I don’t recall having done that very often last year. We have gotten beat but it wasn’t in a situation generally speaking where we were just out of the game. That happened to us a few times this year. The other side of the coin is I think when we played well we played better than we did last year.”
Knight also managed to work in some high praise for Beilein’s West Virginia team, though he wasn’t asked a single question about the Mountaineers during his 12-minute news conference.
“If I were just a fan and I had no interest in this game whatsoever I would really enjoy watching West Virginia play because they are one of the best-coached teams and best-taught teams that I’ve seen in a long, long time,” he said. “These kids play the game the way I think it should be played. That may not be the way that everyone thinks it should be played but they play intelligently, they play within themselves, they pay attention to what’s going on and they’re extremely alert. They are really a well-taught basketball team.”
More from The Pit:
“He was a good athlete, he played hard and Pat (Knight) saw him play in a couple of all-star games after we had got to Lubbock and actually recommended him to several schools, none of whom followed up on it,” Knight said. “When that happened and Ronald was sitting on maybe one or two opportunities to go to junior college I talked to him and said, ‘Look if you want to go to a Division I school and you’re willing to do it without a scholarship we’d love to have you come here.’ So he did. He worked just as hard as if he was on scholarship and he’s as hard a working kid that I’ve ever had.”
Ross says he was won all seven times he’s played at The Pit
“If we get in trouble defensively or we’re having a tough time defending the post then Joey has done that. Joey has been very instrumental in our winning three or four games this year,” Knight said. “Basically you don’t want role players. You want guys that can play. You want guys that don’t have chinks in the armor. They don’t have to be great shooters but you’d like them to be good shooters. They don’t have to be tenacious defenders but you’d like them to be good defenders.”
