Post-Game Quotes vs. Michigan

Michigan State head coach Tom Izzo
Well, it's been a hell of a 16 days. I told my guys probably six games ago, you're looking at definitely playing four top-five teams. I don't know if anybody has ever done that at the end of a conference season. I said it will be a memory making experience if you can do your job. To win three out of four of those games, with the schedule we had, I just think speaks a lot about the character of our guys. Assistant coaches did a hell of a job. To beat three really, really, really good teams, and get beat by a really, really, really good team, I think Illinois, Ohio State and Michigan all have a legitimate chance to be a Final Four team. To have to do it tonight, at times we played very well in that game, not all the time, as you saw, we squandered some things at the end, but for the most part in the second half, we had decent control of the game against, like I said, a very, very good team.

We got play out of so many different people. I mean, sure, Rocket (Watts) had a career game, his mother was here, Joey Hauser played really well, Aaron, after a, I thought a sluggish two-thirds of the game, came back when it was money time. And poor Josh, I thought he struggled getting into foul trouble. When he hit that 3, I was standing right next to him, I was telling him to shoot it before he caught it, because it was just a play where he was wide open, and he just went straight up, straight down, it was as picture perfect as you could get. And I'm looking right at the ball, right at his head, right at the rim, and it was in the whole way. I was happy for him.

We got some play out of our centers. Marcus Bingham, did a good job, Mady didn't play as much, but I thought Julius did a very good job. Gabe Brown came in and didn't really score much; got some monster rebounds at the end, and goes 4-for-4 from the line in pressure-packed shots. I thought I did a poor job of getting him involved early. And maybe an unsung hero, is we talked about playing Jack Hoiberg to get somebody to move the ball, and for Jack to play six and a half minutes, including those couple of minutes at the end of the half, where we needed someone to defend and move the ball. Guys like Jack and Josh that work every day on their game in here, as good of kids as you're going to have, it was just meant to be.

But…(those past) 16 days, I'll bet I never go through anything like that in my career. I'm proud of my team. Happy for our program, happy for our former players, happy for everybody, I'm happy for me that I'll go home and get some rest tonight, and then see if we can move on and get ready for the Big Ten Tournament.

On Rocket Watts' performance…
Well, you know, it's been tough for Rocket, trying to figure out the difference between being a point guard and being a two guard. We did talk about some things that we thought we could exploit that we didn't do as good a job of the other day, and he got downhill pretty good. You know, I just told him, I said if you just…he said I took a couple of bad shots, and I said yeah, you did, but a couple isn't as bad as whatever, and he did what we asked him to do, and that was get downhill, get to the free-throw line, get inside the free-throw line, and there were some opportunities to pull up, and that's when he told me, Coach, my mom came for the first time she's seen me in college. Even tough 'ol Rocket was in tears. Those are the kind of things that make the job worth the job. There's a lot of things that don't make the job worth the job, but those are moments…so, they had a memory-making two weeks, and I got a memory-making moment (today), to see how much that impacted him. That was pretty cool.

On whether the three recent wins over top-5 teams should get them into the NCAA Tournament regardless of what happens in the Big Ten Tournament…
It's funny, I was listening to a show last night and a guy said 'I don't think anybody who has a losing record in their conference should ever be in the tournament.' I just thought, man, nobody appreciates how good this league is. That's part of the problem because where we can say it was like the ACC in '04 – I don't know how many teams the ACC had in the conference in '04 but it probably wasn't 14? I don't know. They're good all the time. I'm not picking apart one of the other. Nobody in a pandemic year has ever gone through anything like this. I'm not going to worry about what happens to Michigan State, I think there is a bigger picture here. The Big Ten Conference – there is not even an argument that it has been the best conference in the country all year. The best conference in the country should get nine, maybe team teams in this year. So, I look at that a little differently, but I'm not no the committee. I'm not politicking for anything. We did just about everything we could do and I think that because of our league, because of the other teams in our league, because of how good Michigan is, how good Ohio State is, how good Iowa is, how good Illinois – who might be as good as everybody. To think we beat four out of the top five teams, yeah, if I had a vote, I'd vote us in.

On if they could play themselves into the NCAA Tournament with an automatic bid based on how well the team has played over the last few weeks…
I'm going to reserve the right to just enjoy this game and not look at that. We're good enough to lose to some teams as well and there is a reality to it. The injuries - I still say Josh, I'm a little worried about it, he just doesn't seem to be moving as well as he was the last two games. I tried to get him some rest the last two days, but really if it's up to me he's not going to practice and do anything. So that's one of my issues.

Hey, we're good enough to beat a lot of teams if we do the things right. Our margin for error is so slim. You can't shoot bad from the free-throw line, we shot better. You have to rebound the ball, we did. The biggest thing is, we had eight turnovers, and when we're under 10 (today). We shot it pretty good from the field, we didn't take a zillion threes. We did some things we can learn from. We're still not running like we were, and I think part of that is our wings are not running as much because Josh and Aaron are a little worn down. As I said, the unintended consequences, if you get an injury, you know what your injury is. When you've had COVID, like some of those guys had, there are unintended consequences that could last for months. I don't know that.

So, I'm going to go down to Indy feeling good about our team, knowing we have a lot of work to do. We're good enough to win some games and we're good enough to get beat in the first game. I don't know who we're going to play, either Maryland or Rutgers. Both those teams have beaten us, we beat one of them – that's kind of the way the whole year has gone. So who is playing well? It wasn't like we shot the lights out today, we won it the old-fashioned way. We probably won it defensively. If it wasn't for that stretch at the end, we had a 10-11 point lead and missed the front ends of a couple one-and-ones, or maybe we could have put it away. Michigan is good, they have a really good team. He has done a great job and they'll be a force to be reckoned with. Who knows, maybe we'll play them again.

On MSU's NCAA Tournament streak and what it says about the team to put together this recent stretch of wins…
I said this to my team in the locker room after – I took all of the pressure of pressure off. But I talked about the white elephant in the room – I told them not to worry about the streak, they are made to be broken. Another streak was I've never had a losing season. All those things get replayed and I lay in bed at night and I look up and I say those don't matter. There are other coaches who are better than me that have gone through streaks. But, you're damn right it matters. It matters to me because it matters for Mateen (Cleaves). It matters for what they build. It matters for Travis (Walton), Raymar (Morgan), Draymond (Green) – all the guys throughout the years. Gary (Harris), and of course Denzel (Valentine), and Cassius (Winston) and Xavier (Tillman). I heard from Cash this morning. Streaks are going to be broken sometime, life doesn't go on forever. But it matters and I think that was one more piece of pressure on them. I tried to take it off of them. I'm not stupid. Like I try to tell them they're not as bad as Twitter says they are, I'm not stupid. I don't follow it, I just know it's what guys go through nowadays. You put the pandemic in on that and everything else. This team will not hang a (regular season) championship banner. Who knows what will happen in the Big Ten or NCAA Tournament, but if there is never a banner hung, or anything done, this team should be appreciated by our fans for what they went through and what they gave us because they hung in there, man. They hung in there. I told you practices were always pretty good. I told you when I didn't think we were playing well or needed better guard play, or when we needed better center play. I think I was pretty honest with you the whole time. I'm proud of this team because they did what I asked of them and that's go out and make a memory for yourself. Fifteen years from now when they talk about the pandemic they can say, 'yeah, we fought through it and found a way to get in the tournament.' And that's going to be worth a memory-making moment – I can promise you that.

Michigan head coach Juwan Howard

On getting every bucket matched by MSU…
We got to do a better job of defending. We always pride ourselves on defense being our staple of getting stops, but unfortunately tonight we didn't do a good job of getting stops when we needed it. I loved our guys' effort, but we got to do a better job of being more locked into the details.

On similarities to the loss to Illinois…
I saw both teams, Illinois and Michigan State, be aggressive from start to finish.

On not matching the aggressiveness…
Right now, I can't tell you. There's a lot of emotion built up and I got to really go back to the film and take a look. I thought we were ready. We had a really good practice yesterday. We also had a great film session. Before practice, we had another really good film session. Last night, we had another walk-through film session. Our prep was really good. We just have to apply it for 40 minutes. We had some really good spurts out there on the floor, we did some good things but there were a lot of times where we weren't locked into the details.

On Illinois claiming they should be Co-Big Ten Champs…
I don't get into that stuff. You aren't going to get a sound bite from me on this. I just know we are Big Ten champs and I'm so proud of our guys for working their butts off since June, they've been grinding. All the unknowns being able to sacrifice a lot and still manage to have a season and then be stars in their own role. That's amazing what our student-athletes have endured and overcome and still at the same time accomplish something so special and that's the Big Ten title. I'm not going to let anyone, I repeat anyone, try, and ruin it for them. They've earned it.

Graduate student guard Josh Langford

On what the win means for the tournament and going through the last sequence of the game…
It's definitely been hard for us with the weeks we've just went through, in terms of the amount of games that we played. The mental and the emotional weight that has been put onto us, it hasn't been easy to carry and to come out tonight and get a win it speaks volume to the character of our team. One thing that we always say, before we go out and play, with the guards and just everybody in general is that we want to keep the right attitude, despite what we see, despite the highs, and despite the lows but staying even no matter what we see, and I think this team has done a really good job with it. Then, you know, the sequence having that turnover then turned it around to hit that three. I think that's just years of playing and realizing that the game, it continues. You know I easily could have been thinking about that turnover and because I was so focused on the last play, I could have taken myself out of that present play and missed that shot. I just wanted to continue to keep getting my all on the court and having short memory, I got the result I wanted to see.

On the bounce back performance of Rocket Watts…
Oh man. Words can't explain of how proud I am of him. I am with him every day. I've seen the work that he has put in. I've had the conversations with him and just how he wants to do so well for this team and for him to have a breakout night of this nature, it's just exciting. It's not nothing that hasn't surprised anybody because this is the Rocket that we've seen last year when we started making that run toward the end of the season. He was the one who was kind of carrying us, along with Cassius, but for him to have this game tonight, it's special. It's really special because he's an unbelievable talent but most of all he's more of an unbelievable person and just to see him get rewarded for all the things that he has been through; it hasn't been an easy year for him. To see him have this game, it's just awesome.

On the celebration after the game…
You will probably see it on Instagram. We just threw water. We threw water everywhere, everybody got wet. It was a celebration that was kind of like, man, everybody can kind of relax their shoulders a little bit just because of all the work and how much we've had to persevere and to be able to end the season, our conference play, like this is not much more than you could ask for. Our work is not finished but we do want to cherish this win because this is a memory that, like coach said, that we will remember forever.

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Players Mentioned

Gabe Brown

Joey Hauser

Jack Hoiberg

Rocket Watts

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