Coach Hinson Press Conference

Southern Illinois men's basketball head coach Barry Hinson met with the media on Wednesday to discuss Friday's season opener vs. Kentucky, Monday's home opener vs. Buffalo, team mindset and more. Below is a partial transcript. To view the full press conference, click here.

What did you think of Kentucky's game against Duke?

Isn't it amazing? We're all human. I just got off the phone with the Kentucky beat writer, and I said, it just goes to show you no matter what level you play at, whether it's junior high, high school, college, or pro, everyone has one of those nights. No one is immune to it. My read on last night is that they had one of those nights. It was one of those nights for two different reasons. Duke had one of those nights, and Kentucky had one of those nights. All I know is, when we run out of the tunnel on Friday night in front of 23,500 people, I promise you the kids in the white jerseys will be ready to go. I know that for a fact.

What did you see Kentucky do well?

It's what they do. What Kentucky does well is length and athleticism. They do a great job on the offensive glass, and they do a phenomenal job in transition. They really pressure the basketball. I thought there was a huge bang-bang sequence in the first half with two really bad calls that both went against Kentucky. It's easy when you put it on video, but I thought that had a major affect. They had just started cutting into the lead, and they had two bang-bang calls that went against them. One of the calls would have been a flagrant, and they would have received the free throws and the ball out of bounds. That would have been a big moment right there. The other was the travel on a breakaway layup. It could have been a swing of momentum.

How do you control the pace?

The only way you can control pace is to score. That's it. If we go up there and get in a hole, like we have in the past with high-major teams, it's hard to get out of. We need to get off to a good start. We know there's going to be an unbelievable wave when we start this game. I've known Coach Calipari since 1995. I can tell you I know exactly what's happening today in that locker room, and what's going to happen on that practice floor. It's the same thing that would have happened here at SIU. We know we're going to have to hit the wave right off the bat and withstand that push.

Can you take advantage of their inexperience?

I don't know how much we're going to be able to take advantage of anything at Kentucky. The game plan is pretty simple for us. We have to go in there and do what we've worked on—try to do that and execute that as best as possible. We're playing the all-time winningest program in college basketball, and I'm trying to this game as simple as I can with our players. I'm trying to keep pressure from these guys. The worst thing we can sometimes do as coaches is add to the heat. I don't want to add to that. There's enough buildup for this thing as there is. We've put together a game plan. We're going to try to execute it. We'll see if it works.

Is there an advantage to not having played on Opening Day?

I don't see any advantage. We tried to get a game and couldn't get one. We would have preferred to start on the starting date, but we didn't have the luxury. We couldn't find anybody. Our schedule wouldn't have allowed us. But had we played on Tuesday, we probably wouldn't have been able to play this game, either, so it always works out for you.

How has Kavion Pippen learned how to shoot over length?

We're going to find out Friday night at 6 o'clock, 7 o'clock their time. I don't know how to answer that question until we see. We don't have those guys in our league. There's nobody like Kentucky's length in our league. We're not going to see anybody like Kentucky's length for the rest of the season. We may see one guy, but we won't see multiple lines of that.

What's the biggest question on your team you want answered, win, lose or draw?

You're not going to get all the answers in one game. One of the biggest answers we're going to get: How do you answer adversity? We're going to learn from mistakes; we're going to learn adversity. We're not going to play in front of a crowd of 23,500 for the entire season. We're 35-40 minutes from Kentucky. We get all the Big Blue Nation reports. We have a ton of Kentucky fans in Jackson County. I watch Coach Cal's show. One of the things we have to do is, how do we handle this going in there? We're going in there with the mindset to do the very best we can do. I've gotten a lot of advice from Coach Kill. He's coached at the highest level. What do you do when you go into the Horseshoe? Do what we do. That's the only thing we're going to ask of our guys. Hopefully at about 9:45 on Friday night, we're going to come out of the game saying we did some good things; we made some mistakes, but I like what I see out of our young men.

How do you prepare for Buffalo three days after you play Kentucky?

We started on Buffalo about three weeks ago. Everyone wants to talk about this game (Kentucky), but when we open up Monday night (vs. Buffalo), we're going against one of the best basketball teams in college athletics. ESPN wrote an article about them two weeks ago: "This is a team that could go to the Final Four." We're going to find out a lot about the Salukis in our first two games. We told our players that. But that's OK. We expect it. That's why we put together this schedule. When I asked Coach (Kill) about the Kentucky game, he said, 'Your schedule is already tough enough.' But we did it for a reason: to prepare us to win a conference championship. Everything we're doing is to prepare us for postseason play. Hopefully, it will pay off.

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Kavion Pippen

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