Thursday’s Myrtle Beach Invitational Quotes – Mississippi State 80, Tulane 66

Mississippi State coach Ben Howland – “Happy to get the win. They’re a hard team to play against. The only thing I’m disappointed in is there were too many turnovers. Everything else was great. You out-board a team by 25 rebounds is great. Our defense was outstanding today. We did a real good job pressuring them, our hedging was good, the field-goal percentage defense was outstanding. Tyson (Carter) had 10 rebounds on defense, which is real exciting for me. To have our guards rebound for us is going to be critical for us moving forward. Abdul Ado, there are so many things about him that don’t show up on the stat sheet, his defense, his changing of shots were critical. Reggie Perry was dominant; we’ve just got to keep him out of foul trouble. He scored 18 points in 20 minutes.” (On the 25 turnovers): “This is a difficult matchup zone because they pressure out of it and we got tired late in the game and had some turnovers. Give them credit, they forced a lot of them. We’re going to have to man up tomorrow (vs. Villanova) because we’re going to see intense man-to-man pressure right in your grill.”

Mississippi State guard Tyson Carter – “We shot the ball pretty well. We’ve got guys who are capable of shooting and tonight was just a good night for Iverson (Molinari) and Reggie Perry. We came out in the first half with a lot of intensity, but they cut the lead down. In the second we wanted to take it up another notch and stretch the lead out and kind of break the game open a little bit.”

Tulane coach Ron Hunter – “Mississippi State has a good basketball team. I’ve played his teams about three times now and I think that’s the best team he’s had. They really shot it well today. That was a great test for us, our kids needed to kind of see that. I don’t know if we’ll see a better team this year. Our kids continued to fight, we wanted to turn them over (25 times) which gave us possessions but as long as I’ve been coaching, I’ve never been in a situation where the rebound situation was what it was. We were absolutely dominated, 41-16. You just aren’t going to win many games that way. The crazy part about it is out of those rebounds they only had 10 offensive rebounds; it’s just we had a lot missed shots. It’s not as if they had 20 offensive rebounds. A lot of that honestly is just chemistry, kids playing together and coaching them. It’s just part of the process, this is good for us. We need to see teams like this, but our kids did a good job fighting back because before you can be good, you’ve got to give effort. That’s the first time since we’ve been a group that we’ve had adversity and you can’t create adversity in practice. To be honest, I’m pleased. I’m never pleased to lose, but I am pleased with the fact I’m learning about the team.”