Head coach Chris Jans talks Butler issues, Pittsburgh challenge and KeShawn Murphy

After spending the past few weeks away from Humphrey Coliseum, Mississippi State (5-1) returns to the friendly confines on Wednesday. And awaiting the Bulldogs is a major test from No. 18 Pittsburgh as part of the SEC/ACC Challenge.

Pittsburgh debuted in the Top 25 rankings this week after winning at Ohio State to move to 6-1 on the season. Pittsburgh is also at No. 5 in the first installment of the NET rankings while State is No. 28.

On Monday, head coach Chris Jans met with the media to discuss Pittsburgh among other topics:

Q: KeShawn Murphy is off to a good start this year. Your thoughts on him?
Jans: Happy for KeShawn. Nobody deserves success more than him. People that follow us know his history and how many injuries he’s sustained and all the time he’s had to rehab in the shadows and wait to get healthy and back on the court. It’s great to see him reap the benefits of his work and his patience. We talked a lot about him going into the season about what a great offseason he had in terms of his consistency with his mental, physical approach and his productivity in our practices.

That doesn’t always get to the floor but when it does, you love that story because in theory, that’s the way you want it to work. The guys that work the hardest get rewarded with their play on the court. It’s been a so far, so good, theme for KeShawn.

Q: When you reviewed the film of the Butler game, what stood out to you to cause the defensive issues?
Jans: We were awful. We were awful on that end of the floor. We just, for whatever reason, did not maintain our identity. The previous night against UNLV, we got our defense into the game from the jump and controlled the game because of our defense. For whatever reason, 24 hours later we didn’t have the same approach as a team. I’m not sure why and I don’t understand why we didn’t but we didn’t.

It was a bad performance, defensively. We weren’t great, offensively, but it was definitely attributed to the defensive end of the floor. I have a saying I use with our guys all the time and I’m not the only coach, I’m sure. But it all goes back to guarding the ball. Any breakdowns that you see with open shots are normally attributed to something that happened earlier in that possession. It’s usually because of a breakdown we had on the ball, either with a 1 on 1 situation or a ball-screen situation or a ghost or shadow or whatever it is.

But it’s always at that point of attack. Then you find yourself in a scramble situation in the rotation. We were just awful at the point of attack. It wasn’t just one person. It was a bunch of guys for whatever reason weren’t on it, defensively. I can’t tell you why. If I knew certainly within the game I would’ve fixed it. We’ve had some tape and discussions in practice since that game on Friday. That just can’t happen. It just can’t happen for us to want to have a successful season. We’ve got to remain true to who we are and why we win. For whatever reason we lost our way on Friday.

Q: Big opportunity on Wednesday against Pittsburgh. What stands out to you about them?
Jans: They’ve got a really good basketball team. Obviously, they’ve got good players, well-coached, just seem to fit together. When you watch them on tape, it starts with their backcourt. The guys they got out there – (Jaland) Lowe and (Ishmael) Leggett – are just really good players. They got size, they got experience and they work together really, really well. Then they got size and different kind of size. They got some stretch bigs, old-school bigs and different guys that can be their quarterback and the action they run in the half-court.

They just seem to play really hard for one another. They’ve had a lot of success. They’re coming off a big road win at Ohio State and they’re No. 5 in the NET and I’m sure they’ll be ranked in the Top 25 when that comes out at some point today. So it’s an awesome opportunity for us. Coming off our last game, you couldn’t draw it up any better, having a chance to play against such a good team, especially at home. It will be a challenge. It will definitely be a change.

Q: What was your message to the team about the defense against Butler and what corrections have to be made?
Jans: Good question. Corrections, it’s guarding the ball. Basketball, like a lot of sports, is doing the same thing over and over. It’s not as glamorous as people think it is. You got to guard the ball every single time. You got to jump to the ball. When the ball is shot you got to check out. You got to rebound the ball. That’s why most people, when they do practices, they do the same things over and over because that’s what the game is. It’s doing the same, simple sometimes boring tasks over and over and over. If you’re not willing to buy into that or understand that or get bored with it, then mistakes happen.

You think you don’t have to do it anymore or we can out-score them. Well, we did it last night but we’re not going to do it tonight. I think it’s more of a mental discipline. I don’t think it’s anything physical. Certainly we had some breakdowns with foot angles and the two guys being involved on the ball screen not being on the same page with the calls in order to put them in position to guard correctly. We had some breakdowns that way and we will keep working to try to correct those. But they (Butler) didn’t do anything we haven’t seen or run some new play that surprised us. It was just not being detail-oriented and what you need to do to be a good defensive team.

Q: What have you seen from Riley Kugel in the past three games?
Jans: Everyone can see the talent. He’s been told that for years. It’s a consistency thing with Riley. One day he looks like he can score at will but the day before when we won against UNLV, he didn’t look nearly the same. That’s the thing that he and us have to figure out and what we can do to help him be more consistent with his approach. The things that don’t jump out unless you are watching it from a coaches’ perspective is the breakdowns on the other end. I just mentioned we had a whole bunch of them and it definitely wasn’t just one guy. But he had plenty of breakdowns, defensively. We’ve shown him the film like we’ve shown everybody else on our team. Hopefully, he and us will learn and grow and be better.

Q: What are you looking for when it comes to your team responding on Wednesday?
Jans: Like any coach, how will they respond? Are they going to go into some mini-team depression, feel sorry for ourselves and start pointing fingers at each other? Or are they going to get deeper into the foxhole and realize we screwed up and we’re better than that. I’m not trying to take anything away from Butler because they’re a well-coached team, they got good players, it’s a great program and they beat us. But we didn’t feel like we played our best and that’s what I told them.

One of the major themes when we approached it once we got back here is that I can handle getting beat and getting bettered by another team and knowing that we didn’t win but we competed and we gave it our best or close to our best shot. They were just better than us for 40 minutes. But that ain’t how I felt walking out of the arena and that’s the thing I’m trying to get them to understand. We can all handle that feeling. But the feeling we had when we left there, that wasn’t it. We didn’t compete at the highest level. We didn’t compete like we did in practice.

The crazy thing is the night before, we did. And that’s sports. That’s dealing with young people. It’s our job to get them to understand that’s not going to work over the course of the season. I will be curious like everyone else will be with what our mentality will be come Wednesday when they tip the ball.