Coach Slessinger's Quotes Following Saturday's 71-61 Loss At Stephen F. Austin

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Overall thoughts on the game
"They played a good game. It was a very bad day for us to have a bad day. We didn't play to our capabilities. We turned the ball over way too much and didn't execute offensively. The turnovers are what got us. Our assist-to-turnover ratio was bad today. We didn't rebound the ball at a high rate. It's the first time in a while we've been outrebounded on the offensive glass. It was just a total disappointment from where we are and where we should be to not finish this game today and not have a great day."
 
On rallying back to make it a five-point game early in the second half before an SFA 3-pointer took away momentum
"We did a good job of being able to get that thing back down to where it was a two- or three-possession game, but then we gave up that huge 3 and weren't able to make a run back off of it. In the end, every time we'd get two or three stops in a row, we weren't converting or we were turning it over and not being able to build a run to get a lead at any point. That's the part that frustrates you so much."
 
On the turnovers in today's game
"We had a couple of costly turnovers where we got steals and turned it right back over. We just threw it away. We had opportunities where we could have gotten fast breaks and gotten numbers. We had some opportunities to get a loose ball in a scrum and they came out with a basket from one of them, and that was a big momentum shift for us. We did not shoot the ball at a rate that we needed to and we turned it over way too many times. They turn it over like crazy. They're a team that turns it over at a high, high rate. Statistically, they're one of the higher turnover teams in the country. We knew that if we could be good defensively, be solid and be where we're supposed to be, we could turn them over. The second half was a much better view of how we thought we were going to play defensively the whole night. There was a stretch there where they got to bonus earlier than we did and they went to the line in four out of five possessions where we had either ran them down on the clock or we got caught with a couple of touch fouls out on the perimeter. Defensively, we just weren't good enough early. When you couple that with the turnovers, we dug ourselves too big of a hole to get out of."
 
On making Stephen F. Austin work on defense more in the second half changed the pace of the game
"The better we were in that aspect, the better we were defensively. We just didn't play well enough. We didn't have a good enough night and didn't do the things we were supposed to do to win."
 
On what the team does following the loss
"We'll get back early in the morning here and we'll get back to work. We've got a short week with a game on Wednesday and a heavy travel day Tuesday. We've really got a practice or a practice and a half to try and fix the things that weren't right. We've got to go back and get ready for Abilene [Christian] on Wednesday, a team that I think is good. They've got a good guard in Jalen Franklin, who is a load to deal with. It's the second time through. The first time through, we're 7-2 and still in first. It's one of these where we sure wish we would have had 10 or 12 better minutes to be 10-0 in this thing. I'm not going to sit here and cry about it. I'm mad because we didn't play well and we didn't play to our capabilities. There's stuff we have to fix, and we're going to fix this. Stephen F. Austin is a team that has been up and down all year. They're a team that was up today. We've got to play really good. We've got to play a lot better. We've got to fix the things that weren't really good."