Canada 97, Mexico 80

August 29, 2007 � Las Vegas, Nevada

Behind 17 points and five three-pointers from Jermaine Anderson, Canada rebounded from yesterday's loss to Argentina and defeated Mexico 97-80 on Wednesday in second round action of the FIBA Americas Championship.

Mexico led 22-21 after the first quarter, but scored just nine points in the second, opening the door for the Canadians. Canada led comfortably the rest of the way, enjoying a margin as high as 27 points.

Levon Kendall and Denham Brown combined for 22 of Canada's 61 rebounds, as they outworked Mexico 61-30 on the boards. Kendall also added 14 points while Brown chipped in with 11.

Omar Quintero scored a game-high 20 points in a losing effort for Mexico.

LEO RAUTINS, HEAD COACH CANADA
Can you talk about Kendall and how he got you guys going in the second quarter on that big run? And could you talk about this marathon of a tournament.
It is a marathon. I think Levon [Kendall] and Denham [Brown] are a prime example of what this tournament is all about. You have to have different players on different games step up. If you look at today's game for Mexico for example, Beck has been just outstanding as a scorer but we were able to take him out of the game. If you rely on one player for every single game it creates a difficult situation for your team. We've been fortunate different players have stepped up. Levon has been pretty much a double-double guy for us the last three games in a row. With Denham coming in today, he has been getting stronger each game of the tournament.

You mentioned the glass, can you talk about the effort today as compared to yesterday?
I think we can be a very capable rebounding team it's something that we really need to take pride in, 61-30 is just a great job, and 26 offensive rebounds, every time we missed a shot we were able to get another opportunity. It puts a lot of pressure, especially on a team like Mexico, they want to run. You have transition defense and offensive rebounds you have two ways to keep a team from running.

DENHAM BROWN, CANADA
Question Inaudible
I think we adapted well. We had a lot of guys on the perimeter wings that took a lot of pressure off the guards. I have been playing in tournaments like this for about five years now and I am just helping guys that are younger and just help take a lot of pressure off the guards.

NOLAN RICHARDSON, HEAD COACH MEXICO
All of the games that we lost were my fault. Not the players' fault. When we win, the players win. When we lose, I lose. I don't think we had the team ready to play this tournament. We were getting better and better and then our conditioning fell apart. Our players play with heart. There are teams that want autographs from the U.S. players, but our team doesn't ask these things because we are here to play

Talking to Romel [Beck] in the hallway, he said he was so tired and he doesn't have any legs at this point. Has the tournament really caught up with your team to the point where there's nothing left in the tank?
When we got here we were ready to play our 20th game in a month. The style of play is really difficult. I thought we weren't as good as we had been when we were playing Puerto Rico and I could see us beginning to make that move toward dead legs. We had a trapping team, a running team and quick to the ball team because we're not blessed with a lot of big people. I was just hoping that somehow we could survive. We had been going from one side of Mexico to play to the other side. The wear and tear in the travel took a toll. I've coached for 40 years and one of my all-time favorites is the Mexican National Team. They were in a situation where you worked them extremely hard and playing lots of teams and no one every moaned and groaned.

HORACIO LLAMAS, MEXICO
What are your thoughts on today's game?
Like coach said, we all came here with the belief that we had worked very well this whole time; each one individually. It was a lot of work. Not only the 19 games we played but all of the travel. We had prepared ourselves very well. We felt complete before the first game. After the first game with Puerto Rico, me, being one of the oldest and with more surgeries than some of the others, I felt like everything would be fine. But when I saw other players like Gustavo Ayon who is 22 years old and has all of the energy in the world start to get tired, I noticed that this was going to be a problem. But we had all been playing so hard for so long. It's hard to get over this fatigue with a tournament like this where there are games almost every day.

Do you think the game with the U.S. took a lot out of the team?
We started the game with a lot of energy, knowing that our goal was to land shots. We've been playing since May and training so hard. We played well in the first minutes but then we got tired. We couldn't keep up the intensity that we had.

Do you think that 19 games with all of the travel is too much? Who makes the decision to play this number of games?
Yes. It's too much. Coach asked for 8 games but it's the Committee's decision. We didn't get involved too much in this decision because we were just trying to prepare. Now we know.