Opening statement:

I think sometimes it's about when you play somebody in the schedule. Right now there's two teams: One hot and one struggling. They went at it tonight, and the team that was hot came out on top.

With the losses piling up, is it possible for your team to play a little looser now that there isn't pressure to be one of the top teams in the league?

I don't think we're feeling pressure right now. I think we were a couple of weeks ago when we started to struggle. I think now we're just trying to continue to lift each other up. I don't think we're at a point where we're saying we have to win, we have to win. We're just trying to focus on staying together and playing together. I thought there were some good signs tonight. I think almost contrary to what everyone would think, I think the losing has actually brought us closer together. Hopefully that's going to pay dividends down the stretch.

Anything Iona did particularly well in defending the perimeter?

I think they're a good defensive team. We knew that coming in, so we tried to get 3s in transition, at the back end of the press. Once they get their half-court defense set up, they're very hard to score on for everybody, not just for us. I did think that we got a lot of good ones in broken situations, like when we were breaking the press. To give them their due, they're very good defensively. I think everyone in the league knows that.

Did it seem like the three-point play by Ryan Thomspson that cut Iona's lead to four points woke the Gaels up?

And we fumbled, we actually had a steal after that, right around half-court, and we fumbled it out of bounds. We had a chance to really get it back to two or one at the time, so we're in that place right now. There seem to be a few of those defining moments in each half that aren't going our way. I think they hit a 3 and it was quickly back to seven and that's just kind of been the story of the last several games for us. I think if we stay together and we keep working hard every day, we still have talent in the locker room. Hopefully, maybe we'll start getting some breaks. If we start pointing fingers and we start to go south on each other, then we'll have no chance it it'll really get ugly. That's my focus. These guys (Thompson and Justin Robinson) as my captains, that's their focus.

I don't believe we're going to go away. I really don't. I know I might sound like a broken record on that, but I think we need to get a couple games in a row where we're playing better. I do think that there's a trust. We have won, and we know that. So there's a trust in how we play. I trust them because I've seen them have success. They trust me because we've had success together. If we never had any success, it would probably be easier to question some things. But we've played this way, we've been successful, and that's something that works in our favor right now, because at least we've had success before.