Rick Pitino spoke to the media for approximately five minutes following Louisville’s tough loss to North Carolina. Here is a recap of Pitino’s comments.

Opening statement on the loss

Give credit to North Carolina. That’s about as bad a loss as I’ve had in my, what, 14 years here. Our guys played great the whole night. They played a great basketball game, did a lot of really good things. It doesn’t really come down to the end of the game, even though they made a very difficult shot and we had a wide-open shot. I know that’s how fans look at it. The key play to the game was, we didn’t run our press offense and I should’ve called a timeout. Instead we threw it to a 5-9 guy posted up at the foul line. Those type of things, you can do something about. You can’t do anything about the difficult shot Marcus Paige made or the open shot we missed. But it was great game, great atmosphere. Give a lot of credit to North Carolina for coming back. We’re playing very good basketball. I’m excited. But also we’re hurting very much right now. It stings as much as any game I’ve coached. Our players are hurt by it. But it’s the ACC. There’s going to be a lot of games like this. There are a lot of great teams in the ACC and we’ll move on from there.

Montrezl Harrell & Chinanu Onuaku’s Play

He (Onuaku) played really well. He did a good job and our guards did a great job. We start up top but he (Harrell) ends up down low. He just had a difficult time tonight, defensively moreso than offensively.

Rozier & Jones’ Play

Chris and Terry Rozier played great. Chinanu played terrific. This is a game we’re going to remember for a long time. It stings. But you can’t let it have a hangover. We have to play Virginia Tech coming up, then we have Duke. We let a golden opportunity get away and we’re disappointed in that. We had them at 38 percent in the second half and they ended up at 52 percent, so you have to guard them. You have to defend every single possession down the stretch, and we didn’t do that. That’s a credit to their offense.

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Fast second half start

We were playing good defense. We stopped them from getting in transition. They didn’t get in much transition for the game. That was good. We did a very good job at getting three people back. Look, we can’t play any better than that. We didn’t execute our press offense well on that one possession. They did exactly what I told them to do, they pushed the pace, they made two passes and we got a wide-open shot. I’ve got no beefs with the effort. We just have to do a little bit better job of containing the basketball because Nanu got caught rotating so much and helping out because our veterans got beat off the bounce.

Paige’s game winning shot

We were trying to trap it, but we had a 6-10 guy who got off his feet and Paige made a very difficult shot. He makes that shot, going to his left. We should’ve trapped it, but Terry couldn’t get over the screen. Nanu did exactly what he was supposed to do. That was a much more difficult shot than Wayne Blackshear’s shot.

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