Myrtle Beach Invitational – Tulane 86, Middle Tennessee State 74 Quotes, November 22, 2019

Tulane coach Ron Hunter – “It was a great bounce-back game in regard to learning something about your basketball team. I wanted to see how they would respond to a tough loss yesterday and they came out of the gates and did a great job. I always talk to the guys about the process of winning and we got up 24 and started to relax. In this business you just can’t do that. Everything we do is just so new so we’re just trying to learn each other. I thought this guy (Christion Thompson) was terrific. I was a little mad at him at halftime and I told him the halftime speech I gave him; we’re going to use that for the rest of the year. This group knows how to win, it’s just got to get to the point where they trust each other. Trust is something you can talk about it, but you just can’t do it in a day. We’re using this weekend as a conference tournament and we have to because we haven’t had much practice. This is strictly a business trip for us.”

Tulane guard Christion Thompson – “No. 4 came up actually for Nobel Days. He stepped up today and gave us valuable minutes. He played a good solid game. Coach got on me, but the team came up to me and told me to just stay with it and trust everybody. Just had to settle down, it got into my head and really, I just chilled, trusted in the process, all the work I put in.”

Middle Tennessee State coach Nick McDevitt – “They were really good early in the game. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to perform at a high level offensively giving up 86 points. We weren’t able to defend the 3-point line well enough to force contested 3s and when we did, we were fouling on the drive. You look at the free throw discrepancy, 30 for them and 7 for us, but that was what was happening. We were getting some quality looks early in the game. We had some open 3s from C.J. (Jones), Antonio (Green) and Donovan (Sims). Jayce (Johnson) had a couple floaters that were close to the rim that just didn’t go in. We were defending OK. At times we were relying on true freshman to lead the charge.”