Missouri basketball coach Dennis Gates met with the media Monday ahead of the Tigers’ matchups with his alma mater California on Tuesday and the game of the year against Kansas on Sunday.
Here are some of his quotes I found most telling.
In his opening statement
What Gates said: “First, I want to say Caleb Grill, obviously, will not be playing. He’s going to be day-to-day, one of the situations where I can comfortably sit and say to you guys and everyone out there, he’s in great spirits, but he will not be playing. The interesting part with the Caleb Grill story, and this speaks for his character, first of all, he spent the majority of the time in the hospital watching his team play on his phone. The other part of it is, soon as he got released from the hospital, he spent time on the phone, probably it was about 2 a.m., where he called and said, ‘Coach, I’m good to go. I’m sitting here jogging in place.’”
What went unsaid: This one is just a fantastic update I wanted to make sure as many people as possible saw. That was a very scary moment last week when Grill was taken off the floor on the stretcher and the medics where checking if he had feeling in his legs. At that point, the only hope was he would be able to return to a normal life. Now, it looks like he might not even miss that much time.
Day-to-day has sometimes seemed to mean something different to Gates than to most coaches, so he might be day-to-day for the next month or two, but the fact that he was not only out of the hospital that night, but jogging in place and calling to say he’s ready to go is about as good of an update as you could hope for.
When asked about plugging the gap with Grill out
What Gates said: “When you look at the depth of our team, you do it by committee. Caleb is definitely an important piece to it, but we saw last game, Marques Warrick, we saw Jacob Crews, we see Annor Boateng, I think those three guys have to continue to step up in their own way without trying to be Caleb Grill, and we’ll be fine.”
What went unsaid: I said in this morning’s Between the Columns (check that out here) that I would expect the move to be more Warrick. I like his game a lot and I think he’s the best shooter on the team after Grill, at least he has been so far at 40.7 percent from deep (Josh Gray is at 100 percent but I don’t think no Grill means we’re going to get a lot of 3s from Gray).
Warrick played almost 30 minutes in the Lindenwood game and is averaging close to 16:30 now, I expect that will go up and we might start seeing him as the first guy off the bench with Tony Perkins if Gates still wants to make his first substitution less than 3 or 4 minutes into the game like he has been.
When asked about the December schedule vs. the November schedule
What Gates said: “The month of December is a different month compared to November. I think when you look at the games this season that we’ve encountered, this is our, our eighth game coming up and obviously, we have some opponents that I think continue to get better. The opponents we played in November, if they’ve had five or six games under their belt, it would be a completely different team that we faced. So I don’t take those things for granted, meaning the number of weeks, the number of games that our opponents face, because it allows them to galvanize, it allows roles, it allows them to get settled in their continuity.”
What went unsaid: OK Dennis, sure. Mississippi Valley State would probably be a better team 10 games into the season than it was two games into the season, I guess, but that doesn’t mean that game would have been much different.
I get that coaches don’t ever just say ‘Ya, the teams we’re playing now are better’ because they don’t want to be disrespectful, but come on. Cal and Kansas and Illinois are better than MVSU and Arkansas-Pine Bluff and Lindenwood, that’s not disrespectful, it’s just true.
This month is a tougher schedule than November was.
That’s just a fact.
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