KEITH GROLLER'S LEFTOVER COMENTS ABOUT LAST NIGHT'S BASKETBALL

Two entertaining games and too little room in the paper to tell the whole story.

So here are some leftover quotes from two hard-fought basketball games in Forks Township Tuesday night where the Nazareth and Allen boys were victorious and eyeing a Friday night championship game, and Liberty and Whitehall were left disappointed.

First from Liberty coach Chad Landis:

"It is disappointing because we tried to set ourselves up for this all season and I thought we did a decent job. But Nazareth was really terrific. We got it back to 25-25 and it should have been more of a dogfight from that point on. We talked about changing some things defensively and we just didn't do it. We were too complacent and non-chalant about how we went about our business. But give Nazareth credit because they did a lot of things really well."



Asked if Liberty was hurt by Nazareth's 1-3-1 defense in the previous meeting, Landis said:

"No, because we made a handful of 3s early against them before. Some nights we can make 3s and some nights we can't. Tonight we didn't shoot the ball well from the outside. We made a couple late, but when it mattered, we were like 1-for-12 from 3-point range or something absurd like that. They packed it in on us and we couldn't get to the glass either. Their defense just got us complacent."

Asked about Nazareth's multiple weapons on offense, indcluding Dan Wilk on right, Landis said:

"They've got good bigs, so if you extend your defense on them, they can make you pay inside. And if you tighten up and help inside, they have guards who can make shots, too. They really can hurt you in a lot of ways."

Asked about the emotion star player Darrun Hilliard displayed after fouling out, Landis said:

"He was very upset because he puts a lot into his basketball season and he really wants Liberty to win. Once he fouled out, he knew he couldn't help us win. He didn't agree with the call. But that's a part of basketball. Those things happen every game and you have to battle through them and overcome them if you want to be a good player and he will."

Asked how his team will respond in districts, Landis said: "We'll see. This is an interesting bunch."

From Allen coach Doug Snyder:

"Early on we were horrible with turnovers [10 in the first half]. That's something we still have to work on. We don't make good decisions, don't give ourselves a chance to get a good look and turn it over. Defensively, we went to some zone to try to take away some of that dribble-penetration they were getting on us. This is as quick and as athletic a Whitehall team as we've seen in years."



On not being able to stop the Zephyrs' Matt Greene, who had six 3-pointers, until late in the game, Snyder said: "The scouting report said to make sure Greene doesn't get good looks and we just didn't do a good job with that. But he's that kind of player. He's a great player."

On playing Nazareth on Friday night, Snyder said:

"We're excited to be in the championship game, but Nazareth executes their halfcourt offense as good as anybody around. They're so, so good in the halfcourt. We'll see if our man-to-man defense can stop some of that, but they're really doing a great job right now."

From Whitehall coach Jeff Jones on blowing a fourth-quarter lead:

"We had more lapses on the defensive end and that bothered me more than our lack of execution offensively in the fourth quarter. We had lapses that can't happen against a good team."

On his team's 5-for-10 foul shooting, Jones said:

"It's not good enough to get to the line just 10 times all night and then only going 50 percent is certainly not good enough."

On his team's offensive woes late, Jones said:



"We didn't make shots, we didn't execute, we didn't run our press-break stuff very well. We like to get transition points out of it and instead, we turned it over. That was disappointing, but the kids played hard and fought to the very end. Still, it's very disappointing because we expected to be here. It's something we talked about going back to the very beginning of the season."

On the George Williams 3-point shot that put Allen ahead with 1:31 left, Jones said:

"That was huge. We were up one at that point. We were doubling down on the post and they weren't kicking it out too often. But they kicked it out there and he hit it. If you're going to give up a shot in the match, it's going to be from the corner. Give the kid credit because he made it."

Source: Keith Groller