Dec. 15, 2001
Stanford University Cardinal
Head Coach Mike Montgomery:
Opening Statement - That was a pretty entertaining game, the first half in particular. In the first half, Long Beach shot the ball very well. We can't have them shooting better than 50%, that's too much. The obvious point is that we need to play better defense and we need to be more aggressive. We only had three team fouls, and the question at half time was whether we had played good defense or if we were just not aggressive enough - we all agree that we weren't aggressive enough. I thought that we played pretty good offense, we had a lot of people open and Long Beach had a hard time handling us inside. Curtis Borchardt [career-high 25 points] was pretty effective, he was really shooting the ball well and rebounding. I think for a team to shoot the ball as well as Long Beach did and us still to get away by 20 points was encouraging.
Can you talk about the team's offense tonight?
There's no question that we've got to get Curtis [Borchardt] more involved on offense. Curtis has been improving as time goes on and he's gotten a lot more comfortable. He had a really nice turnaround shot, he had a nice touch on the ball, which is difficult for people to defend. We've still got some guys gambling on defense and that hurts us, we've really got to be solid - we need solid passes and defense. [Tony] Darden hurt us in the first half, he had 11 straight points and we can't let that happen. But I think it was an entertaining game and we played pretty well.