Here’s what the UNLV Rebels said after their win over Southern Illinois

What the UNLV basketball team said following its 68-61 victory over Southern Illinois on Monday at the Thomas & Mack Center:

COACH MARVIN MENZIES

“They were really good defensively. They did a good job of taking us out of our stuff at times and jamming us when we picked up the dribble. They capitalized on all of our mistakes. It wasn’t just the turnovers, it was the points off turnovers. Twenty-two points of their 61 were off our turnovers. So take care of the ball, maybe it’s a different story, but it’s a great lesson for when we get into conference. We’re going to have some tight games, and there’s no substitute for going through something like this and coming out on the right side.”

“I don’t know (Tyrell Green’s) previous post efficiency, but obviously he was doing it well enough in practice for us to go, ‘Hey, we’ve got to get him some looks down there, especially on certain matchups.’ You can usually judge a game going into it on matchups. I think Bill Russell once talked about that. … When you look at matchups and you look at Tyrell and who’s guarding him, you obviously try to give him some (inside looks). Where he’s also done well is the rebounding side of it. He had seven tonight. There’s where he’s really started to take some ownership and be there for us.”

“We’ll try to design something (for Thursday’s home game against No. 3 Kansas), but we’re not going to try to get too far out of our box. We’ve got to get ready for conference. That’s what this is all about. At the end of the day, we want to be able to go into conference and own our signature. People have got to know when they play us they’ve got to take tough twos. We’re going to defend better than what we’ve been defending. We defend well down the stretch, but we’ve got to get better in those areas.”

GUARD KRIS CLYBURN

“It was a tough win. We’ve got to put this one behind us. We had a lot of turnovers (23). Once we get back to the drawing board, we’re going to look at the mistakes we made and things we can work on and become a better team each day.”

FORWARD TYRELL GREEN

“This game I feel like we needed it. It brought out the best of us. I feel like the last four minutes, we were really active. We were talking on defense. But we need to try to bring that for the whole 40 minutes, and that’s what Coach is preaching every game.”

Contact Mark Anderson at manderson@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2914. Follow @markanderson65 on Twitter.