Lorenzo Romar says Arizona ‘did whatever they wanted’ in second half of UW’s 99-67 loss in Tucson
Here’s all that Huskies coach Lorenzo Romar said after UW’s 99-67 loss at No. 18 Arizona on Thursday night.
One quick update on Andrew Andrews -- he was favoring his right ankle afterward, but did not seem to think that the injury would keep him out of Saturday’s game at Arizona State.
On to Romar:
(Opening) “Arizona played a heck of a second half. They guarded us. We shot 30 percent, they shot 70 percent. They made 3s. They just did whatever they wanted in the second half. Give them a lot of credit. They played very well tonight.”
(What made it so much easier for them to score after halftime?) “I think we – this was the first time, to me, and Arizona can do this to you because of the level of team that they are, but you don’t have any margin for error. And they made us pay for it. And as we came down, possession after possession, ball not going in the basket, you could see us slowly, defensively, start to break down. But they had a lot to do with that too. They created some really good mismatches against us, and with us in foul trouble, there wasn’t a whole lot we could do. We had one timeout left for the longest, but didn’t want to use that timeout because if we were able to come back we wouldn’t have any timeouts. We used them as much as we could. So we couldn’t make as many adjustments as we would have liked to, but they did, and they took advantage of it.”
(On problems in the second half) “It was a combination of a lot of things. All of a sudden we started to go back and try to steal the ball when they got the rebound. We weren’t sprinting back on defense. Defensively, they take the ball out on the inbounds, they scored on us as much as any team has probably in three years on out of bounds plays. It was just every area. Every area, we were breaking down in that second half.”
(See anything like that coming?) “No, not at all. I didn’t see that coming at all.”
(Seemed like Arizona really wanted to pound it inside) “And their bigs, I think Ryan Anderson se the tone earlier in that game. He was getting offensive rebounds. He was very aggressive, him and Kaleb (Tarczewski). (Dusan) Ristic was in foul trouble in the first half so he only played seven minutes, but Kaleb and Ryan, they did a great job being very aggressive inside.”
(Is Andrew Andrews OK?) “He was hobbling in the second half, but he’ll be OK.”
(On missing Devenir Duruisseau, who has a concussion) “He’s another body. If we go back to our first game against Texas when our guys got in foul trouble, Devenir came in and did a very good job for us. Just (missing) a body. But they were missing a body, too, their leading scorer, Allonzo Trier, so we can’t snivel about that.”
(Any worry that this loss might linger?) “No. Have a short memory, get to the next game. We can’t look at how we got beat. We’ve got to say, lick our wounds, let’s go, get up off the mat. We’ve got another game.”
(Any positives?) “Uh, no. That it ended. But no.”
This story was originally published January 14, 2016 at 8:54 PM with the headline "Lorenzo Romar says Arizona ‘did whatever they wanted’ in second half of UW’s 99-67 loss in Tucson."