St. John's Head Coach Norm Roberts
Opening Statement:
"I knew that St. Francis was a good team. I knew that they played small and they could shoot inside and stretch it out, which is what they did to us. I thought our guys did a great job with being resilient, coming back when things weren't going great. Justin got into a bit of foul trouble, but he still stepped it up when we needed him to. I was really happy with how the freshmen and the whole team stuck together. Geno made a great pass at the end to seal it with Justin's dunk. We'll get better; we just have to keep working at it. I really like the fight in the guys and the aggressiveness they show."

On Larry Wright's performance:
"I thought Larry did a great job. He was aggressive like we needed him to be. We want him to shoot the ball every time he is open. He is doing a better job with the mid-range area. He can really elevate and shoot over people because he's added some strength too. We were happy with what he did tonight."

On guarding St. Francis' Robert Hines:
"Hines is a very tough match up because he is a very good scorer and he is strong. I thought Justin did a good job with him early, but then Justin got into foul trouble. Then Paris Horne and D.J. started guarding him and they did a very good job with it. They did a very good job of getting underneath him and making it tough for him. That's the versatility we didn't have last year, we couldn't do that."

On improvements in scoring runs since last season:
"I think we will shoot the ball a lot better once we get Mason out there. Mason can score off the bounce as well. We have to do a better job of getting to the offensive glass. We only had seven offensive rebounds tonight. We have to do a better job of rebounding, period. We know that's going to be something that's very important. That is probably the toughest thing to teach a young kid, to rebound and to keep players off the glass. Those are the things we really need to work on. Hopefully, though, the scoring will continue."

On his emotions after St. Francis made a second half run:
"Every team makes runs. It's about how you respond to the run. We responded well, we came back, we stayed poised. We stayed under control and just played together."

D.J. Kennedy:
On playing in his first real game:
"It was big for all of us. We had a lot of jitters. I didn't expect to play that many minutes. I didn't know how tough it was to play 40 minutes. It's a big adjustment to make out of high school. I played power forward, a position I'm not comfortable with, but I got the job done. I also have to give a lot of credit to St. Francis, they played hard, despite being a smaller school."

On his mindset replacing Anthony Mason Jr. in the season opener:
"I just go in and try to give the team whatever they need. It really doesn't matter where I play on the court. If I'm out there I'm going to play hard and give 100 percent every time I'm going to do whatever it takes to win. The more games I play, the better I learn."

Justin Burrell
On playing in his first real game:
"It felt pretty good out there. I was really excited. I was pretty nervous as well, but I try not to show that on the court. I tried to keep my head together and it felt pretty good."

On how long he thought he was in the air after his game-ending dunk:
"Long enough to stay safe."

On playing against the double-team defense:
"I knew it was coming. In practice I worked with a lot of the double-team defense on me. No matter how much you practice, it's kind of like a new experience when you play in a game situation."

St. Francis Head Coach Brian Nash
On tonight's game:
"I was disappointed in our teams' performance. Having a team of veterans and having the opportunity to own the lead late in the game against a BIG EAST team. Norm's got some younger guys and we hoped to put ourselves in that position to have a lead late in the game and hopefully our veteran leadership would come out and step up but their (St. John's) guys came up and made bigger plays than we did. Larry Wright had a great game and Burrell made some baskets. We didn't run very good offense towards the end."

On the final minutes:
"We got ourselves in a hole early on. We played defense and we fought ourselves back. We ran bad offense and it turned into transition baskets for them. We have to get better at that and that is something we are working on."

On the future:
"We're a veteran team. We have four returning starters and I expect us to be an experienced team that doesn't make the mistakes that we made tonight down the stretch. We have a freshman point guard who made a few mistakes at crucial times but he has to grow from that that. As he grows he's going to make us a better team."