Buzz Williams on Diggy Coit's career night, takeaways vs. Mount St. Mary's, areas of growth

Ahmed Ghafir
22 hours ago
7 min read

Everything that head coach Buzz Williams said following Maryland men's basketball's overtime win:

On Diggy Coit’s 41-point performance

“I'll tell you what, I thought Saturday was a lot of amazing things relative to what we pay attention to. And similar to the last time I saw you, I thought as we were closing down week two, our concentration was could we increase the capacity of our group to have more endurance and sustainability relative to the things that we think are important? And - different venue, different opponent, Coach [Gene] Lind is tremendous. The execution of their team, tremendous. But I do think that the endurance of our guys has continued to increase. I think some of that, Gene, is we've tried to be very diligent and faithful in not skipping steps. Year one, week three, trying to make sure that we're ultra-aware of the things that last and the things that matter the most in the process. And a credit to Diggy, but also a credit to those eight guys that played in a completely different role than they've ever played. We've played five games and every game there's been a different role assigned on things that we can't control and I think that they continue to have growth. And I credit a lot of that to our staff and the teaching, the breakdown work, the clips we're showing in film. It is some elementary things that are required in this foundational work. And our guys continue to receive it, which is a credit to them.”

On the importance of the win without Pharrel Payne

“I think [Pharrel] [is] a really talented player, and I think [Pharrel] – I know everybody initially thought I was foolish for saying our points per possession relative to our free throws was kind of maybe a skewed number. [Pharrel] gets fouled at a high rate. That's important to our team. He does give us a presence of physicality on both sides of the ball. And I'm just as thankful and humbled and proud of what took place over these 45 minutes as I was the 40 minutes in Milwaukee. Because there was every opportunity to just pack up and go home in Milwaukee and there were even more potential justifications for the same thing happening tonight. And I thought the group with very little experience together and many of them only five games of experience in their life at this level, their rate of growth has been tremendous.”

Where Buzz sees improvement from his team

“Not to be condescending, but my coach's answer would be the same as the player's answer for the first time ever. Yeah, I think the things that we're measuring, we're having growth in. I think some of the language that our guys are using in front of me is right. I think the intent of what they're doing there is not only an understanding, there's a comprehension. Our execution level of those things have got to continue to improve. And I think being positive, not negative, it's not a thing – it’s multiple things. And I think that's what makes it a delicate line of if there's a litany of things that you have to work on, you can't work on all of them. So of that list, which ones impact winning the most, most often? And now split it up, and what is that list offensively? And what is that list defensively? We're playing [Andre Mills] at the four for - so Dre plays his highest number of minutes ever in his career. [Darius Adams] plays his highest number of minutes ever in his career, as does Elijah [Saunders], as does Diggy, as does Aleks [Alston], as does [Isaiah] Watts, as does Willie. I would say Colin [Metcalf] may have played more than that in his career. So we played eight guys and seven of them played career high minutes, and all of them, to some degree, except Colin, were out of position per se, other than Alex. We played Dre 36 minutes. And I would say, if you take away Collins, and you take away some of Alex, I would say he played over half of those minutes as our power forward. So, like we didn't practice that. But I do think the things that we're practicing are translating. We just need them to translate at a faster rate. And I think, without divulging too much information that seems boring, I think we have a defensive coordinator Devin Johnson, we have an offensive coordinator Lyle Wolf. They each have an assistant and then we kind of structure a lot of what we do relative to our meetings as coaches, even with our team almost very football-centric. And I think the things that we're concentrating on and the ways that we're trying to gain advantages and cover up problems, I think we're having growth, but my easy answer would be everything.”

On Buzz’s impact on Diggy Coit

“Thanks for your kind words. I don't want to take any credit. I think anytime there's the amount of growth and maturation an individual's had in such a short period of time, it would be a credit to him and to his parents. Diggy is easy to like and I'm hard to like. And so when I like someone, I'm very aware of how difficult it is to like me, but if I like you, then my aggressiveness is probably more than normal.”

“I told Diggy yesterday, after practice, somebody in here last time was running a podcast, and he called Diggy, David. I've never called Diggy David. And so as he was asking the question, in truth, I was like I don't know what he's asking, and I don't know you guys. And so I'm trying to do good in here. And so I eventually realized he was talking about Diggy running the point. So yesterday, after practice, I said, hey, you know how I was telling you about that guy that was asked calling you David? I said I think I need to call you something, not Diggy, not David. And he said, why? I said, it's kind of like in the Bible, like we should just change your name because you've changed your life. And he goes, coach, I've never in my whole life been held accountable like this. And I go, well, that's why your life is changing. And then after the game, he gives me a hug, and I said, perfect opportunity. How are you going to handle this? Are you going to use an invisible mirror for somebody else or are you going to receive the adulation? Because your growth has happened privately, not publicly, but your growth was revealed tonight publicly. So it's a great opportunity to see how you're going to handle it. He's easy to like, and I can't coach everybody like I used to coach, and that's probably why I can still have a job. But I can coach him like I used to coach, and he asked me to coach him that way, and he texts me 72 times a day really, really life related, personal, hardcore stuff. So I'm happy for him.”

On Elijah Saunders’ play, battling for the loose ball, winning in the margins

“I was so happy. Too animated, technical worthy. And then in the I think it was in the first half, loose ball over here, closest to our bench, and [Darius Adams], we call it Superman. Is it 10 fingers and 10 toes in the air? We call that a loose ball. Falling over and reaching, that doesn't count in how we measure. [Darius Adams] had a Superman to Watts and we scored on the other end, and I called Time out. And first time DA has done that and Elijah continues to be more physical, be more aggressive. I don't think it's his nature, but his nature is bending. We politely touch them with pads every day. And when I get a hold of a pad, because I have permission from his dad, I try to hurt him, and he's starting to come around, and we need him to come around. He played, man, he played all but one minute and three seconds and he got five rebounds. I personally think he can do more. And I understand he spent 20-plus minutes of that at the five confused about what we were doing. And you could tell some of our possessions were scattered at best because they're trying to figure it out. But we've had a day and a half of trying to manipulate it all, but we need him to – we need all of them - but we need [Elijah] to hurry up, hurry up.”

On Mount St. Mary’s shooting 50% from 3PT

“I think Devin has made some really good adjustments. We're playing a mish-mash defense. Parts of what we have done still apply. Some of the changes have been relative to our roster. And I think the thing that has hurt us the most, other than defensive rebounding percentage, is the percentage of times the opponent has gotten to the paint. So we've made some adjustments to try to protect the rim more. And when you make those adjustments, you're probably giving up something. You're not going to be able to do both. And so tonight, they got to the rim 28% of the time, a really good job. A negative is when teams are getting to the rim, they're scoring at an astronomical rate. So how can we defend without fouling? We got fouled more in Milwaukee than we fouled them. That was the first time ever. We played the second half in Milwaukee without getting to the bonus, first time ever. Tonight in the first half they didn't get to the bonus, first back-to-back times we've ever done that. So we're not fouling as much. We want to play, to get fouled and defend without fouling. We're doing a really good job of that. Our adjustment to protect the rim has helped us but the consequence, the byproduct of it, is we're going to give up more threes. I think Saturday was the highest number of three-point field goal attempts in coach Smart's career other than his first game as the head coach there. They shot 41 threes in his first game there, they shot 40 threes on Saturday. Our contest, and it is something we measure, and we have made improvement individually. It's what we measure. He did go on a heater. We tried to adjust. The adjustment was right. The execution of the adjustment wasn't right. But that's going to happen again because you can't - you got to figure out one or the other. And we were just getting - have gotten through two and a half weeks, we've gotten beat up in the paint too much.”

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