2023-24 Chattanooga Mocs Men's Basketball
Game 18 – at Mercer
January 17 – Hawkins Arena – Macon, Ga.
Postgame Quotes
 
Dan Earl, Head Coach
Overall thoughts on Demetrius Davis' performance.
"I thought Demetrius [Davis] did a great job at that. Obviously, you look at the stat sheet and you look at points, assists, things that show up. But, if you can play with tremendous energy, I thought he did a really good job at that tonight. He was flying around, jumping passes, he was great in that area tonight."
 
On what went right tonight against Mercer.
"One of the big things in basketball is playing guys tendencies. If you're playing a dead-eye shooter, you can close out short, you have to fly at that guy. If you're playing a driver, you can't close out too hard and let him by you. The downside is, we gave up 19 offensive rebounds. I thought Mercer did a good job of crashing the rim, but aside from that, I thought we did a good job communicating and playing to their tendencies."
 
On the streak of six or more threes in a game snapping at 52-straight.
"It's not something we're gunning for, per say, but we only had 20 attempts. You can't just keep going east-west and you just can't keep launching threes. You have to go north-south at some point. I thought Trey [Bonham] was fantastic at that tonight. He made some shots, and some tough shots, but late in the game he was really good at getting downhill and getting other guys involved. In general, I thought he played a great game."
 
On handling Mercer's rally in the second half.
"I think we had a good counter punch, if you will, and we knew Mercer wasn't going to go away. If I'm being critical, we've been allowing our offensive struggles to effect how we play defense. They cut it to two or tied, whatever it was, but we regained our legs and went out and took on the game again. I thought we were better defensively down the stretch, and offense, but we closed it out. They kept fighting."
 
Demetrius Davis, Sr.-F
On the rebound performance on the defensive end.
"We came in trying to provide ourselves on defense. We've been working on that all week. We have to keep going. We have an athletic team, quick guys, guys who can get hands on the ball. We felt like we had to ramp our defense up in the conference."
 
On the team not knocking down six or more threes for the first time in 53 games.
"I didn't know we had that streak [laughing]. We've been working on getting downhill and not settling. We know we can shoot from three, but we also know we can get downhill. We're strong and athletic, so we just keep trying to get to the rim to make things easier."
 
On locking in defensively down the stretch.
"It started with our defense in those last 10 minutes. We call three stops in-a-row a "kill" in our system. We just wanted to get stop after stop and we knew that's how we can win games."