Additional Quotes >> Uruguay 82, USA 80

Oct. 28, 2011 • Guadalajara, Mexico

Nate Tibbetts
USA head coach

Your thoughts on tonight's game:
I thought it was a competitive game. Uruguay played extremely hard and they just kept fighting us, kept fighting us and they made the plays down the stretch.
I thought we were confident coming into the game. I thought we played pretty well in the first quarter and then they got some energy. They’re a well coached team and they played extremely hard and kept coming after us.

Talk about the last play, what were you hoping to do?
On the first one we were trying to get an isolation for Jerome Dyson and they did a good job of coming up and fouling him. On the next play we were running a special with a pin down action for him and I thought he had a good opportunity but he slipped and fell and that’s the way the game goes sometimes.

What were some of things you saw that you were not happy with?
I thought offensively we were really lackadaisical as far as getting into our stuff, and a lot of the credit for that has to go to Uruguay. They played their butts off and we knew they were going to come in and play hard, they didn’t want to go home 0-3 and you know they’re a good team, they’re well coach and they competed, they stayed with it.

Did hitting the threes early hurt the offense? It looked like they settled for jump shots.
I think we were pleased early with trading baskets and we’ve got to be a team that guards you and we didn’t do that and it came back to bite us. But we’ve got a resilient team and we’ve got another opportunity tomorrow. When we came here we wanted an opportunity to play for the gold medal and we still got that.

What do you have to do in the semifinals.
We’ve got to just get back to playing the way we did the first two games; stay competitive and really want to guard people.

Jerome Dyson
(Tulsa 66ers/Connecticut '10)

Talk about the last play, looked like to split the screens, got up top clear and slipped.
Yeah I slipped and hit the floor and I just didn’t know how much time was left and so I was just trying to get shot up to at least get an attempt.

Probably the better look was that first play where they fouled you?
Yeah the first one was good. We had it set up where I was at the top of the key and coach told me to get to the bucket and they fouled me so we got the ball out of bounds for the last play.

The USA still moves on to the semifinals, can the team regroup?
We definitely can. We knew coming into this game that we had already finished in first place, so we just have to come and play the way we played the first two games and not let the game slip away and get careless with the ball and finish the game out.

It seemed as though turnovers were an issues and the offense was settling for threes because you were so successful early making threes?
I do think we settled a lot, we got comfortable with just playing back for basket with them and not getting the stops the way we’re capable of doing. I think that was the biggest thing, we just thought we would beat them by scoring more points than them and that’s now how we play. We get stops and we make other teams work on offense and we definitely didn’t do that. They got a lot of layups and wide open jump shots.

Marcus Lewis
(Tulsa 66ers / Oral Roberts '09)

Seemed like in the end when we got the ball inside to you, you were able to get to the basket and score. Did you feel confident?
Yeah it was going for me inside, getting easy baskets. Every time they came to me I tried to make sure I put the ball in the basket.

What about defense, it seemed like they were getting a lot of easy baskets, wide open looks:
I think our defense wasn’t our best, we could have played a lot better. This loss is a reality check for us, it’s good to wake us up and let us know we’ve got to come hard, every possession, ever y minute, every second and if we do that we’ll have a good chance to win the gold medal. But if we come out like we came out today it’s not going to look good for us.

So you know what you’ve got to do and what you’ve got to do is play defense?
Yeah, yeah. We’ve got a good group of guys and we all know what we did wrong, we all know our defense wasn’t great. We let them go middle sometimes; we didn’t box out sometimes; and we just weren’t in tune at the defensive end. Each guy on this team knows what we have to do to take care of business. I’m very confident that we’ll bounce back tomorrow two times harder than we usually would.

Renaldo Major
(Dakota Wizards / Fresno State '04)

What does the team have to do differently in the semifinal game?
Actually we just need to get back to what we were doing the first two games, playing as a team, passing the ball, looking for each other and basically play defense. We didn’t play any defense this game, we thought we could outscore them and that wasn’t the case. We live on our defense and our defense didn’t come to play today and they outscored us and give them credit they made shots and they won the game.

It seemed like the offense was settling a little bit for 3-point shots?
We did settle for outside shots. We didn’t attack the basket like we normally do. I think they probably got more free throws than we did and in the last two games we’ve been outshooting everybody. So we did settle a little bit, but tomorrow is another day and we play at 1 p.m. and it’s good that we play early so it won’t be too much a hangover we can just go home and get a good meal, sleep and be ready to play tomorrow. This is what we wanted to do, we wanted to put ourselves in the position to win the gold medal and we’re in that position now. If we can go out and win tomorrow we’ll be in the gold medal game, so we’re still okay.