Saint Peter’s season came to an end on Thursday night as Tennessee basketball coasted past the Peacocks in an 83-49 route
Following the loss, Saint Peter’s coach Bashir Mason discussed Tennessee’s stout defense, his respect for Rick Barnes and much more. Here’s everything Mason said.
More From RTI: Everything Rick Barnes Said After Tennessee Defeated Saint Peter’s
Opening statement
“Man, those guys are good. Ton of respect for Tennessee, how hard they played, how detailed they were, taking away our strengths, how physical they were. Gang rebounded the ball.
Coach Barnes does a tremendous job. The amount of respect they showed for us in terms of how hard they played and the detailed they broke us down, just a ton, a ton of respect for that program. I can’t say enough about them.
One game for us, one loss, you’ll hear on this stage, sucks. But I’m confident in my guys and the season that we had. I feel great about us being back here soon.”
On the lessons learned from this game and run to the NCAA Tournament
“I don’t know if we end up winning the game. I thought what Latrell just said, I thought that was a big part of the game, and I call that character reveal. I thought we experienced some adversity early into the game, our emotions came out and didn’t allow us to focus and play at the level that we’re capable of.
I’m around these guys daily. I coach them. I know these guys inside and out. So I know that we have a little bit of those emotional things in us. That’s our growth right there.”
On if he’s able to appreciate how difficult it is to make it to the tournament
“Absolutely. As I’m walking down here just quickly reflecting on the game and just also thinking about the history of St. Peter’s, the run here, I’m reflecting on who they beat to make it to the Elite Eight.
Then you think about what our game was like tonight, that run we did two, three years ago, that was impressive. That was really impressive for that to happen for a small school in Jersey City.”
On how tough it is to play from behind against Tennessee
“It’s definitely the best defensive team we played against all season. They’ve got size. They’ve got details to what they’re doing. They’re strong. I was hoping we could make it a bang-bang game through the first couple of medias.
I thought they established their physicality and what the game was going to be the entire game. I asked the officials can we start running the clock? It was that difficult to look up at the score. As a coach, you kind of know we’re not going to be able to get back into this fight.”
On if there was anything they felt they could exploit offensively about Tennessee
“You know what, we’ve struggled to score all year, to be honest. We averaged 65 points per game. The goal was to see if we could kind of make those guys struggle. I didn’t think — for a team that’s averaging 79 points per game, outside of Dalton and Zakai, those other guys have been kind of spotty. We were hoping to try to control their two main guys and put pressure on those other role guys to make plays, and it just didn’t work out for us.
Again, we were trying to use our defense and our rebounding and kind of slow them down and then see if we could be in it that way.”
