Oklahoma State University Athletics
Oklahoma State Postgame Quotes vs. Northwestern State
December 17, 2001 | Cowboy Basketball
Dec. 17, 2001
OSU Men's Basketball
vs. Northwestern State
Dec. 17, 2001
Postgame Quotes
Oklahoma State Head Coach Eddie Sutton
On Maurice Baker
"He had a great game. He had 22 points at half time. I think sometimes when we get a big lead he's really content to let his teammates score points. It doesn't happen very often that one individual outscores the opposing team. He did that in the first 20-minute period. When you look at his stats he had 22 points on nine out of 13 shots. He had nine rebounds, five steals and four assists. That's a great performance."
On goals
"I thought overall our defense was really good. We'd set a goal for ourselves to try to hold them to under 30 percent shooting and under 20 percent shooting from three-point range. We also wanted to try to limit our fouls to 12. They did shoot poorly. They shot 26 percent and 20 percent from three-point range. We only fouled 14 times. One thing we did not do a good job of early was putting people in a bonus situation, and that's how a team can stay in the game if you hit free throws. Two areas where I thought we did a poor job were our free throw shooting and rebounding. We gave up too many offensive rebounds, and we didn't do a very good job on the defensive board.
On McFarlin, Crawford and Sanders
"Ivan played very well the second half. I thought Terrence and Melvin held down that position even when they didn't score a lot of points. They played pretty well."
On whether OSU is prepared to go on the road
"I think our defense is good enough. When you shoot free throws as poorly as we did, you're asking for trouble. I don't understand that (the free-throw shooting). It has the coaching staff baffled. We've really worked hard on free-throw shooting, and in practice they hit them. For some reason they can't move it from practice to the games."
Oklahoma State Guard Maurice Baker
On his first half performance
"All week in practice Coach (Sutton) was telling me to look for my shot, I just came out early and started firing it up there and it was falling in. I told everybody that I was going to come out and shoot the ball today."
On the second half
"They went into a box and one so I was like a decoy. I was just trying to move around and when the defense would look at me my teammates were getting easy buckets."
On the upcoming games
"We have a couple of good teams, Ball State's pretty good, so we just need to get focused and put all of the cupcake wins behind us and just move on."
On playing their first real road game
"We want to go on the road and see where we are. We've been playing at home with the crowd so we want to see if we can go on the road and get a win."
On the No. 6 ranking
"We're really not looking at that, we are just trying to win some games. They keep ranking us high. We look at it but we don't really focus on it."
