Tom Crean’s postgame comments on Maurice Creek
Courtesy of IU Media Relations:
“I’ll start with an update on Maurice (Creek), he has a fracture of his left knee and will have surgery tomorrow. I am in the process of getting his parents here so they can be here for the surgery. I don’t have many more updates than that. He is a very, very special young man. It’s gut-wrenching in so many fronts when you see a young man like that go down, who works as hard as he does. It’s a little different for us as the Crean’s and for the coaches because he was probably going to be with us where ever we were at, whether it was Marquette or here at Indiana.”
“For him to come with us here sight unseen, and commit four months before he ever saw the campus, that’s a special young man from a special family. Obviously our number one concern is that everything goes well throughout that surgery and I have great confidence that it will. I told the players this is one of the reasons that you come to Indiana that you hope you never have to use – the professional care that you get when you come to a school like Indiana. With the resources that we have here, it’s tremendous. He is in great hands there.”
“Our team certainly feels for him. They had a very good performance tonight. They did a lot of really good things. Obviously we are playing a team that is going through growing pains and doesn’t have a great record, but when you hold a team to 25 percent from the field, and 18 percent from the three-point line, it’s really about what your team is doing. We needed to have a game like that and we had a game like that. More importantly than that, they really, really feel for their teammate, and as a coach you hate to ever see anyone go through that. But also as a coach and a leader of the program, you know that you have a program on the right path, when they care that way about their teammate. They are going to have to mature.”
“I was asked a question from John Laskowski, what the difference going into the Big Ten, and I said, well the biggest fear is the maturity you have to have moving forward and now that maturity is going to get tested even more. Not just because he’s the third-leading scoring freshman in the country, but because Maurice Creek on the court brings confidence because of his athleticism, talent, and his ability to score. That’s what great players do, they bring confidence to their teammates. Now, we are going to have to find confidence from one another. We will have to continue to find that confidence from our crowd. They are stunned right now, but then they are going to be stung. We said to the team, in football they talk about next man up and it’s not a situation here where one individual is going to come in and get 18 points a game, everybody has to do more and that’s the bottom line.”
Filed to: Maurice Creek, Tom Crean