Capel: 'This is a gut punch'

After his team lost to Minnesota by a point on Tuesday, Jeff Capel talked to the media about bouncing back from another tough loss.

Here's the full rundown of what he said.

Capel: Congrats to Minnesota. This one hurts. I mean, all of them hurt but this one really does. First thing, I’m proud of my guys for continuing to show up. This is - we’ve not gotten off to the start to the season that we anticipated and certainly that we want, but I’m proud of them for continuing to show up and continuing to fight. I do really feel like good things will happen for us if we continue to do that.

This is a gut punch. If we can just get one defensive rebound the last two possessions, maybe it’s a little bit different. But we didn’t. They made plays. Salute to them. I thought we defended well enough to win but we didn’t win.

Again, disappointing, hurt for our guys, but proud of the effort.

Offensively, what were some of the biggest - you made one shot in the final six minutes, went scoreless in the final 2:55; what were you not seeing from your guys in that time? What were the biggest shortcomings you were noticing?
Capel: We didn’t make shots. I think it’s as simple as that. John was having his way; they started packing it in, started going way under him on ball screens, really just started flooding everything down there. We got some good looks, we just couldn’t knock them down. We had some costly turnovers down there during that last part that really, really hurt us.

On the last possession before they made their shot, it looked like you guys did have something drawn up to go inside but it was cut off and led to a contested shot. Do you recall what the play was there?
Capel: Yeah, we were going to try to get into a flat ball screen, just to try to open the floor up a little bit and allow J.B. a chance to make a read off of it. He got to a spot, we just didn’t make a shot.

When you look at stats from this game, you hold them under 40%, you out-rebound them by seven, you turn the ball over 12 times; is it especially frustrating because that’s probably how you would want to draw it up, right?
Capel: I’d like to make more shots, obviously, and I’d like to not have double-figure turnovers. But to hold them to under 40%, yes, that’s absolutely what we would like to do. That has to be part of the recipe for us to win, so it is very disappointing that we did those things but we didn’t finish at the end. The last two possessions that they had, the first-shot defense was okay but we didn’t finish it out with a rebound.

We can look at John’s point total and rebounding total; beyond things like that, what were the most encouraging things you saw from him tonight?
Capel: I thought his defense was the best that it’s been all year. I thought his ball-screen defense was really good. He got on the floor for a loose ball. He was a guy that helped all over. We wanted to do that. That was part of our game plan with their fives, for the guy that was guarding their fives to be a helper everywhere and I thought he did a really good job of that.

This season, he’s had some uneven performances. He gets double-doubles in two of the first three games; then the next two games he has nine points total and then he followed up a 21-point game against UMBC with what he had tonight. How for a young player do you try to work to get consistency?
Capel: It’s something you certainly want. You try to teach him. One of the things - and again, we look at John as a freshman, because he only got to play seven games last year and he had some really good games toward the end, we felt like he was coming on. But when you start to have some numbers like he did the first couple of games, then teams have tape on you. They start to game plan, they start to do different things. That’s certainly going to happen from these last two games as we move forward. So it’s little adjustments that you have to make and just teaching him how to do those, to work harder, to do your work a little bit earlier, to be able to play through contact, to be able to play in a crowd, to make good passes, to not force it at times, to let it come to you. I think he’s learning that as we go forward.

Was there a challenge that you put to him? Because you talked in previous games about how he wasn’t finishing and he was getting tired at the end, but in this one, he was diving for loose balls late in the game.
Capel: We talk to him all the time. It’s something, with all these guys, we’re trying to teach them, we’re trying to help them get better. It’s a process to become good - a good player individually and a good team. And we’re learning how to do that. We’re taking lumps but we’re learning. And the thing that I keep telling our guys is, as long as we show up, keep showing up with the right attitude, the right mindset, fighting, fighting for each other, positive things will happen. It may not look like it now, but I’m a firm believer in that. And that’s something that we have to continue to do. Individually and collectively.

Knowing your team like you do, how do you expect them to bounce back from this gut punch?
Capel: We’ll bounce back. We’ll be ready to go on Friday.