Will Wade talks prep for Georgia and more

LSU head basketball coach Will Wade is preparing his team for the Georgia Bulldogs after a tough loss in Gaineville.  He talks about that and much more. 

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Partial transcript

Opening Statement...

“Obviously, coming off this kind of loss at Florida, our transition defense is going to have to be on point. We have to rebound better against Georgia. Georgia is 15th in the country in offensive rebounding and they blow the ball up court in transition. 13th in pace and second in the country in transition conversion rate, so transition defense and being able to rebound are going to be two critical areas for us. We didn't do a great job rebounding at Florida, giving a 46% offensive rebounding rate to them, so we're going to have to certainly improve there. We’ll have everybody available except Shareef [O’Neal].

On Will Wade’s ‘spirited’ talk with the team…

“We talked about the difference between being a good team and being a great team, how to respond the right way, and we need to need to clean up some things. We have to do some dirty work things if we want to be the team that we're capable to be.”

On Georgia’s defensive approach…

“It starts with [Sahvir] Wheeler. He's their engine on offense and defense. He gets the ball in the paint, he's one of those rare guards that can just swipe the ball from you. If you turn your back on him, he's going to swipe the ball. No. 5, [Justin] Kier does a good job, and [Tye] Fagan is active defensively as well. Their big guys are active, [Andrew] Garcia, from Stony Brook, he has a really good block rate defensively, good steal rate for a big guy defensively. All their guys are active. They fly around and play extremely hard, and they play extremely fast. They do a great job of using their defense to create offense, so a big point of emphasis for us is making sure we value the ball. They’ll play mostly man, they played quite a bit of 2-3 Zone as well, I’d say 70/30 man to 2/3 zone, but it’ll be the first time we've seen 2/3 Zone in a couple of weeks tomorrow.”