Jeff Capel met the media after Pitt's loss to North Carolina on Tuesday night. Here's the full rundown of what he said.

Capel: First of all, congrats to North Carolina. They are really playing good basketball right now. Their young guys, their freshman guards, have really grown up and are playing much better than they were earlier in the year. And their veteran big guys were the two guys that really impacted the game at a significant level. Their two big guys scored the basketball, but then their other older guy, Leaky Black, with what he was able to do in being disruptive on the defensive end.

So congrats to them. They’re a good team. They’re playing really well right now. I thought we did some good things at times, but we have to be able to do really good things for 40 minutes, and unfortunately we weren’t able to do that.

We talked a lot going into the matchup about Carolina’s size. They start two guys who are 6’10” and have a third guy who is 6’8” in the starting lineup. When there’s such a size disparity, how much is there that can even be done to kind of mitigate that? And what was your general plan going into the night to try to combat that?
Capel: Yeah, most of the teams we play against are bigger than us, and we’ve done a pretty good job all year. You know, we have to block out. We have to be physical. We were not physical today. We weren’t physical with our block-outs. We weren’t physical trying to get open. They were able to take us out of some things with their pressure. And we have to do a better job of that. That’s what we talked about, and we knew rebounding was going to be a significant portion of this game. We know that’s a major strength of theirs; they’re number-one in the conference and number-two in the country in offensive rebounding. When you know Carolina’s program, that’s what they do.

And then you know transition defense is going to be paramount. We thought if we were able to rebound like we had been earlier in the year, or prior to the last two games, three games, we would be able to get out in transition against them. But unfortunately we weren’t able to do it.

Just looking at what Terrell and what Coulibaly were able to do for you with foul trouble, how much did that cause a problem matching up with their size?
Capel: It hurt us with Karim being in foul trouble. I thought we made a push. We won the first segment of the second half, and that’s what we talked about at halftime, just gradually cut it, to win each segment. So we won the first four minutes and then he picked up his third, and when he went out, that hurt us. That hurt us defensively. That hurt us offensively. So again, in a game like this, when you know the ball is coming inside, you have to do a better job early defensively and then we have to get some help. But that certainly hurt us when Karim picked up his third foul and had to go to the bench. I think they pushed it - that’s during that period right there where they pushed it to 16.

There weren’t as many possessions as in some games, but do you need to find ways to get Justin more than nine shots in a game?
Capel: We do. We absolutely do. And again, we have to run our offense better in order to do that. We have to be able to execute, we have to be able to get into entries and get the ball where we want to get it to. They did a good job. North Carolina did a good job of taking us out of some of our stuff today.

What did Carolina do to kind of take you guys out of that?
Capel: They pressured. They were up in the passing lanes. They really used their length at the 3, 4 and 5 with Leaky, Bacot and Brooks, and when they came in with the other big guys, they really did a good job of being up in passing lanes, taking us out of entries of some things that we wanted to do. We weren’t able to get to some of the counters, we didn’t make some good decisions at times.

You brought in Femi for 11 minutes this game; he got six points and looked like he started to get into some different things. How did you assess his performance and the time he was giving you off the bench?
Capel: He’s been solid. He’s been solid. He’s done some really good things for us. We need him. We think he’s going to be a good player for us. He’s been a good player for us. He did some good stuff.

Was there anything offensively in the second half, especially during a couple of those spurts there early in the second half when you got to the rim easier and then you had the 10 unanswered points. What seemed to be working for you in those moments?
Capel: We put them in ball screens, we got their bigs moving and we got them in ball screens, got them mixed up a little bit. They made an adjustment; they started switching everything and we weren’t able to capitalize on that. But that’s what we did early. We got them moving a little bit and forced them to talk. They didn’t maybe during that moment do a great job communicating; we were able to take advantage of that.

You know, we missed some shots at the basket. You think about the first half, if we finish some of the plays at the basket that we had, I think it’s at a minimum a tie game if we do that. When we have opportunities at the basket, we have to be able to finish or we have to be able to get fouled and then go to the free throw line and step up and make free throws.

Defensively, you guys were able to get some shots late when you were pressing more; is that something that you think you can do more consistently late in games when you see teams relying on their bigs the way North Carolina does?
Capel: Well, that’s something that we talked about for this game that we wanted to do. We wanted to pressure them. Pressure’s a way that you can defend the post. If you can make the passes a little bit more difficult, if you can make their sight, their line of vision, a little more difficult, you can get some deflections and kind of scramble around and do things like that.

Obviously, for 40 minutes, we didn’t do a good enough job of it.