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Duke won its fifth national championship game on Monday night with a 68-63 win over Wisconsin.
Following the game, Wisconsin head coach Bo Ryan was critical of the officiating, claiming the crew allowed more physical play that previous games.
Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski made his rounds on the radio on Tuesday, and when he appeared on Mad Dog Sports Radio, he was asked about the comments Ryan made.
Here’s the bullet points from Coach K’s response.Sometimes, if you just hear a remark -- you don’t hear the entire press conference -- you react. That’s happened a lot to me in my career. I don’t know all the things Bo said. I do know it’s tough to lose those games and to then go up there and have people try to nitpick at everything you say.
We were fighting fouls the whole game. We had no continuity. Wisconsin did a couple things to get us into foul trouble, like [Frank] Kaminsky drove on [Jahlil] Okafor, just like we were trying to get them into foul trouble. We drove the ball on matchups we thought where we could get fouls. That’s part of the game. They did that to us, we did that to them.
It’s easy for me to say this because we won the tournament, but I thought the officiating was as good as we’ve had. I wish we had this national agency for at least the five power conferences and maybe the Big East where officials will only do games in those conferences so you’ll have better officiating. I’m all for them having fewer games, more pay and benefits.
Ryan was later slammed for his rent-a-player comment in the post-game press conference.