Jan. 9, 2008
Recap | Final Stats | Notes | Photo Gallery
Coach Herb Sendek
Opening Comments:
"It was especially good to have such a great family atmosphere here tonight. On behalf of our players, I just want to thank all the Sun Devils who came out and supported us tonight. It most certainly provided us with a great atmosphere. I thought our students were tremendous. I thought both teams played really hard. There were no losers tonight. That game could have gone either way, a shot here, a play there. We were fortunate to win it. But I thought both teams played with tremendous heart, a lot of guts. It wasn't necessarily artistic. Probably both teams missed some shots that they normally make, but there was a lot of heart out there tonight by both teams. That was a fiercely contested college basketball game."
On what he told James Harden at halftime:
"I talked to him the whole game, not just halftime. The one thing that's great about James is he listens. If you share something with him, he tries to take it in and use it to his advantage. I love that quality that he has. He got off to a rough start. He's able to turn it around, and think about sometimes how hard that is to do. He's able to do that on a dime, and that just shows you a lot about his character."
On how much Ty Abbott's foul trouble in the first half hurt:
"That's the first time we've played this season with him out of the rotation for that long. But other guys, I thought, did a really good job stepping up. We got good minutes in the first half from Antwi [Atuahene] and from Christian [Polk] to help us hang tough until we could get Ty back in the game in the second half. Obviously, he hit that big shot with 1:36 [left], down five, to cut it to two. That was a significant play in the game, because with 1:53, they had gone up five, a few seconds went off the clock, and he hits the 3 to cut it to two, we get a stop, and then James comes down and ties it for us. That gave us a chance."
On the rivalry with Arizona:
"It's really hard to sustain something for a long time. Sometimes when you're really close to something it's easy to take it for granted. There are pictures in your house, or maybe a clock, that you've seen a million times, but if someone really put it to you to start describing one of those things in detail, you'd be like, `wow, I don't really know.' So, sometimes things that we're close to, we take for granted. I'm a relative newcomer here, and what Arizona has done, for a long time, is remarkable. They've sustained excellence for a long time, and that's really not easy to do. I have great respect for that. We happened to win tonight's game, no more and no less."
On his feeling about the win:
"It feels really good. Finally. If I leave here, I can at least say I got them once. They didn't get me. They didn't get JP while he was here. It feels really good. They're a really good team. We knew that this was going to be a war and this was going to come down to the wire. We toughed it out and got it."
On the play of James Harden tonight:
"I'm not surprised. Ever since he got here, I could tell this guy could do big things. Crunch time came, timeouts, I'm looking at this guy and I could see it in his eyes, he wanted it so bad. He didn't want to have his freshman year start 0-1 to U of A. He turned it up a notch and got his buckets."
On his performance tonight:
"My teammates did a great job, getting me the ball, setting screens, doing everything to get me open shots. So, all the thanks should go to them for getting me good shots."
On the crowd tonight:
"This was my first game here with a packed crowd. It was great, like a sixth man on the court, seventh man, so many people were here. It helped us a lot. In overtime, it helped us a lot. We fed off that."