“I think Alabama said in the second half, 'No more letting him catch it. Let's make it hard for him to get it in there. Boy, we didn't get a lot done with the other players when we needed to.”
“We got 10 minutes into the game before he decided that he better start playing at that energy level. He's got to learn that he's got to bring it every night. I was disappointed in him that first 10 or 12 minutes. I thought they were really taking it to him. Hopefully, it is a learning experience. He got going after that, but it wasn't enough.”
“There were two things we needed to do well coming into this game. Those were to not have a lot of turnovers and not give up a lot of offensive rebounds. And we give up 27 turnovers and 23 offensive rebounds. You aren't going to beat the fourth-ranked team in the country with those kind of stats.”
“Paul has struggled against taller people at times throughout his career, including tonight. Size bothers him unless we can pull him out. ... We were not making shots, particularly early and now he's having to score over bigger people. They did an outstanding job.”
“I thought we, for the most part, did as well as you can defensively against these guys. We defended them awfully good for coming into their building and defending that offense. Unfortunately, I thought our guard play was bad in the second half. (We) forgot about the best player in the league right now.”
“It was one of those games you'd hate to see either team lose. It was a defensive battle. Keeping them off the boards was a major emphasis and we lost the game on an offensive rebound.”
“Everybody knows he can do it. Night in and night out, they're trying to stop him from getting double figure rebounds. Regardless of how he plays, regardless of how our team plays, win or lose, you're going to pick up that stat sheet and 99 percent of the time there's going to be 10 rebounds on there. It's incredible. It's incredible.”
