Dec. 20, 2008

Recap |  Final Stats |  Notes

BERKELEY -

California head coach Mike Montgomery:

On whether the 10-day exam break contributed to the Bears' slow start:
Theo had the flu for two days, didn't practice Wednesday or Thursday. I didn't think he was as good as he's been. I thought Reno was very well prepared for us and the things we want to do. They run a lot of the same things we run, and I thought they made a concerted effort to take Jerome [Randle] out and Patrick [Christopher].

On what did and didn't work for Cal:
Unfortunately we weren't able to get much inside, so we kind of had to go small. We had to make a switch, put Patrick on [Armon] Johnson. I thought he did a pretty good job. Obviously at the end Johnson hit two or three 3s and got to the basket. He had a great game for them. And Babbitt is very good, freshman. Two players we knew were good, tried to highlight in our preparation. But we didn't shoot the ball very well.

On what the issue was in the game's early stages as Cal struggled to click:
I thought by and large early that they played harder than we did. I thought maybe that they wanted it a little more than we did. And again, I told the guys coming out of finals, that's possibly where we were mentally and physically a little fatigued, but I thought they played harder than we did early on.

On how matters improved in the home stretch of the second half:
We made some good plays. We had some decent calls, a certain call that worked for us where Theo got a couple of 3s, and that worked really well and kind of broke us loose. I thought Reno did a great job. They were very well prepared for who we wanted to shoot and where we wanted to shoot from. I just think at some point we probably mentally recognized we had our hands full out there and maybe concentrated a little bit harder, set better screens, tried to get better shots. I think concentration was probably an issue.

Nevada head coach Mark Fox:

On the difference in today's game:
It was a hard-fought game. We had some very glaring mental mistakes defensively. Quite frankly, just freshman mistakes, and that was costly. But they're a good team, let's give them credit.

On the hot second half by Armon Johnson, who scored 27 of his 33 points after the break:
We wanted him to be aggressive. We didn't think he started the game as aggressive as we wanted him to. But he did in the second half.

On Nevada's success containing the Bears' Jerome Randle:
I thought we did a pretty good job a lot of the night. Late, he got loose on us a little bit. But he's a good player.

On the Wolf Pack's early foul trouble:
We were in awful foul trouble the first half, just awful. I thought that was certainly an issue for us. We're going to have to learn to avoid that, because we can't overcome that.

On how he rates his team's defensive effort:
I thought second half was poor, unacceptable. We defended them for 32 minutes, maybe.