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Player-coach says Lithuanian team offers 'new blood' to UA basketball

Senior guard and player-coach Josh Pastner, still re-living his nothing-but-net three-pointer from Sunday's game against Alytus Alita of Lithuania, sat down with the Arizona Daily Wildcat men's basketball reporter and talked about the first exhibition game in the weekly installment of Pastner's Notebook.

Q. First of all, you guys wanted to play different competition. You got a different kind of look out there, playing a different style than what you're used to.

Pastner: Guys are tired of playing against each other, it's a lot of same-old, same-old. It's good playing against new blood, because when you play against each other so much, you know each other's plays, obviously, from practice and stuff. So it was a good feeling to go against different opposition.

What are your first impressions on the freshmen backcourt? They were running up-tempo and made some mistakes, but generally looked okay.

They made some mistakes, but again, that's a learning process. Both Jason and Gilbert did a great job. They're only freshmen. The whole backcourt did well, when John (Ash), Lamont (Frazier) came in. We have a good backcourt from top to bottom.

Now that you have played with only five players on the court at one time, how deep is this team?

Well, I think you look at this team and we really go 10-11 deep. That's a huge asset to the team.

Coach Olson was getting vocal late in the first half because the team wasn't moving the ball around and forcing a few shots.

I think we need to move the ball around more because if you live by the three-pointer, you die by the three-pointer. We got a little three-happy for a while there, but it got better when we moved it inside.

Was this one of the quietest 52-point wins ever?

Yeah, I would say so. We came out strong right from the start and hit our first four or five shots and got an early lead. It was pretty quiet, but we got the job done.

You even hit a three-pointer. Is this a sign of things to come?

I hope so because every time I'm in the game, it means we're winning by 20 points or more. Let's hope I get a lot more opportunities to shoot the three like that.

With one exhibition game under its belt, what will the team be working on this week in practice?

I would say this week we'll for sure be working on the defensive end, just on the little things that maybe I didn't see, like getting a little ball pressure here, a weak-side rotation there. But overall, I was pleased with the way things went and we'll be looking to get better this week.