Ryan Addresses Media During Monday News Conference
November 05, 2001 | Men's Basketball
Wisconsin men's basketball coach Bo Ryan spoke to the media on Monday during his weekly news conference. The conference was Ryan's first Monday news conference in preparation for the 2001-02 season.
Ryan spoke on the injured Andreas Helmigk and the upcoming exhibition season. A partial transcript of the conference follows.
On Andreas Helmigk: 'We thought that something happened out of the ordinary and I guess your first instincts are usually the ones you go with and Andreas has torn his ACL and will have surgery and will be out for the year. Hopefully we can again turn a negative into a positive. We'll consider it a redshirt for this year and hopefully he can do some other things with his upper body and with the rehabilitation come back even stronger and learn some things while he's watching. '
Isn't all of this bad news getting real old' It 's unfortunate news, it's injury news, it's whatever your program goes through. Sometimes it happens to people right in the middle of the year. Sometimes it happens at the beginning of the year or at the end of the year going into tournament play. What we're hoping is that these things that happen will happen now and not later because really, we don't have a fudge factor now.'
What will you miss with Andreas not on the court' 'When you're on the ground floor, anybody that watched any of our practices and saw Andreas going up for a rebound you saw one hand sticking above everybody else's, and it was Andreas'. He's long, maybe not as physically capable of doing some things right now because he never really was on weights like some of our players, so now he has a chance to maybe make up for some of that. But what he gave us was a lot of action around the basket, his post moves were improving, he listened, he was attentive, he wants to learn. The practice before [he went down] the coaching staff said it was his best practice. Mentally, he is down, it's probably tougher for a person from a long distance when something like that happens, but he's hopefully going to turn this into a positive down the road and we're going to work with him to do that.'
How does the loss of Andreas affect your rotation' "A four-man rotation for two spots just went to a three-man rotation for two spots. Some guys are going to get in foul trouble, some guys matchup better against the fours and fives from other teams. When you have four to choose from it's a little bit better than having three and I don't think we want to get down to two, but that's where it makes it a bit tougher. In the past usually it's been four guys for two spots at the 4, 5 and all four get time because I'm always getting ready for the next year too. You always hate to have a year where you lose five seniors and have very few guys back. In recruiting and the way you play guys you try to build so that after one year you're not devastated, so the program doesn't take a big drop due to a lack of experienced players.'
Do expectations change' 'No. I still expect the same things; for them to come to practice today and work as hard as they can. I expect them to compete on every possession and this will be an interesting test. EA Sports, formerly known as the California All-Stars have a few different teams traveling around. The team we play played Missouri, DePaul, UW-M, Michigan, they'll play Marquette, and we get them on Saturday so I'm sure that's what a lot of people will be looking for, to see how we match up, to see how the rotations will go. Expectations; those won 't change.'
