To beat St. Francis, you have to go through the guards. I think they account for about 70 percent of their scoring, but then the big guys inside do all the grunt work. They are a well-rounded group.

Defense is what carries us. It got us the momentum and it got us some easy baskets. That's how we got that run.

I don't know. I was very worried about the situation. The bus forgot to pick us up, and we were scrambling to get here. That really screwed up the routine, so I was really glad when I saw that start that we had. Usually we start out slow, and the fast start really put me at ease.

I think we won the game five times and lost it five times throughout the last two minutes of the fourth quarter and both overtimes. It was a dogfight and we just gutted it out. When we needed a stop, we got it. My hat's off to the kids because, at the end, maybe they just wanted it a tiny bit more than [St. John's] did.

The Rams] did a lot of gimmick things we'd never seen all season. They played a box-and-one. They stalled the ball on offense. They pulled out all the stops, and we didn't play with any sense of urgency or enthusiasm, I didn't think, until the second half. Then, I think we did a lot better job.

That's the best he's played all year. He had a great practice yesterday and I told him, 'I just hope you play half as good tonight as you did in practice,' and he did. He came up big for us tonight and we needed it, obviously.