Post-Game Quotes
12/4/2008 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Dec. 4, 2008
Michigan State Coach Tom Izzo:
I think I'll start out with giving North Carolina a lot of credit. They played well. They made some shots. I was actually pleased with a lot of the things we did in the first half, but I thought Lawson hit two dagger threes in the first half from very deep that I hadn't seen him do. Maybe I didn't watch enough film since I got all seven games in.
The second part of it is not credit North Carolina, but blame to me on the scheduling. I know it will sound like it's an excuse, but we were just dead. We had no legs. We had Marquise Gray that had probably the worst game he has had all season and (Draymond Green) got in foul trouble. I'm still not trying to play Delvon Roe over 20 minutes. We just had no legs left. I thought the start of the second half, Raymar Morgan had the shot early in the second half and we had two shots in and out, and then after that it just went downhill.
Like I said, the credit goes to them. I'm going to try to build off the first half. I thought we did some great things. We shot well. We got the ball inside...We just didn't get enough play from enough other guys. I think it was a lot more fatigue than it was anything else. It was four games in seven days, an NBA schedule, and I did it, so blame goes to me, not our players. Travis Walton traveled back and forth to school. Goron Suton was here then he left. He'll have surgery tomorrow. As it was, we did not play real well. It was a little embarrassing in the second half, but I'm going to take something out of the first half and try to build on that and go from there.
North Carolina Head Coach Roy Williams:
Well first of all, let's be honest about things. We played decently on defense in the second half, but we faced a team that had three straight games in Florida and coming back. In the second half, it appeared to me, but you'd have to ask Tom about his team, but they seemed to lose their legs a little bit. There's no way our defense caused them to shoot 20 percent (in the second half). I hope that our substituting and us trying to force the pace and making teams go up and down the court, might have had something to do with it.
We feel very lucky, and we were lucky to get a schedule like this. We played Sunday, but it was at home. They played Thursday, Friday, Sunday, and then come and play like this. They have some guys banged up to begin with, but we did some nice things there's no question about it. Ty Lawson had 17 points, eight eights, no turnovers and seven steals.
Tyler Hansbrough had 25 points and 11 rebounds. Some of you may have seen me walk out with about 15 minutes on the pre-game warmup clock to see if his ankle had loosened up. The problem we've been concerned with the last two games at least has been his ankle, not his shin. He hurt his ankle in the Santa Barbara game and that's been more of a factor in deciding whether to play him or not play him. Sunday, in fact, at the start of shoot around on the day of the game I thought he was going to play and it never loosened up and at the end of shoot around I made the decision he wasn't going to play. It was looser today and it had gotten better for him.
Right now the whole team needs to take some days off. We have exams coming up. Danny banged his hip again during the game and he was great as you may have seen or heard on Sunday against Asheville making the 3's. We took Ty out on the last possession of the first half because he rolled his angle and put Larry Drew II in, but fortunately for us it wasn't a bad sprain. We taped him up a little tighter and he played the second half.
