They Said It: Wofford Postgame
Samford Scoop got the chance to talk with Samford head coach Bucky McMillan, Lukas Walls, and Jaden Brownell following the 77-61 win over Wofford. Brownell led Samford with 18 points and Walls finished with 12 points and three rebounds.
Q: “How proud of you were the effort defensively, especially in that first half coming off of the last 10 minutes of the Chattanooga game and that carried over into tonight?”
Bucky McMillan. “Yeah I thought it was really good. We were dialed in, committed to winning. If you can play two minutes, give us your best two minutes and be ready to go back in. If you can only play one minute because that’s the effort that it takes, you can only play one minute. That’s what it takes. Like don’t worry about your playing time, play out there as hard as you can and as long as you can play hard. That means I only got 45 seconds, you got 45 seconds. That was good to see, we obviously passed the ball better, we moved the ball better. We had 7 steals in the game, they had 10 turnovers. You’re not going to turn them over much but you still gotta disrupt what they do because they’re really good at what they do.”
Q: “Trey Fort with consecutive games in double figures, how have you seen his confidence kind of waver the last couple games? You were trying to get him some easy looks early in the game.
McMillan: “The biggest thing Trey is doing right now, he is letting the game come to him and play winning basketball. He’s trusting his teammates, he’s passing the ball, making life easy. When you get to the SoCon (play) like teams are going to key on you and if you’ve got the ball, you’re just going to drive it into 2 two people. It’s going to be really hard to score and for a team to win. Our team has done a better job of recognizing how teams are playing us and be willing to pass it, give it up and get to the second side of offense.Therefore our percentages are going up, particularly last half of the Chattanooga game and obviously we shot over 50% from the field in this game.
“So that’s better, I mean that is what winning looks like. It’s going to take guys saying hey I may score a little bit less, get a little bit less shot attempts. I’m going to shoot a higher field goal percentage and that is really if you want to be successful. You want to play at the next level, they’re going to look at that more than anything. They don’t care if you score 20 or 12. They wanna say, well it took the guy 16 shots to get 20 and this is not about Trey this is just in general. And he shot 33%, it took this guy eight shots to get 14 and he shot 50% from the field. That’s what they want to see, that’s winning basketball.”
Q: Lukas, you play in your role and play it well. What is it like with Bucky showing confidence in you and last week a couple weeks ago he told us that the UNCG game was made for you. What is it like knowing Bucky has that much confidence in you?
Lukas Walls: “It’s been helping me a lot and for me I know that we’ve got a ton of players on the team that can score the ball. I mean you can go down the line, everyone can score the ball but when I come in that is not necessarily my focus. If the opportunity presents itself, I’m going to try to, but the thing I do the best is I’m trying to out hustle everyone. I’m trying to play harder than everyone, I’m trying to pick the pace up on defense, get offensive rebounds. Just do that tough, dirty work down there and hopefully everyone else in the teams feeds off that and a lot of times they do. That’s when we start to get really rolling and having Coach Buck supporting me like that always boost the confidence a ton.”
Q: Jaden, what is it like when you get into a rythym like that in SoCon play and seeing the ball go in the basket more?
Jaden Brownell: “Yeah I would say we are, everybody on the team can shoot. We try and we love to shoot threes and Coach lets us to shoot the three balls. So it definitely feels good to hit a few and have teammates that trust in you to pass you the ball when you’re open, the coaches' confidence to let you shoot the ball when you’re open and just knock them down. It definitely feels good to get you into a rhythm.”
Samford is back in action at Furman on Wednesday at 5:00pm on CBS Sports Network.
