Post Game Quotes Against Grand Valley State
11/1/2006 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Nov. 1, 2006
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. -
Michigan State Head Coach Tom Izzo
Opening Statement...
Well, it's been an incredible day here. I must tell you that with all the things that went on back home, I'm not sure I did as good a job, but before I talk about our team I think you do have to give a lot of credit to Grand Valley and Ric (Wesley). He's a good friend of mine. I think he's a very good coach, and I think he had his team well prepared to play. I think they played very well most of the way, but kind of slipped up on our ball screens in the end, which they had handled very well early, and they probably deserved to beat us. I don't know what happened to us the first 16 minutes of the game.
I'm going to try to find a positive now, so give me a second. We scored 51 points in the last 24 minutes of the game - for our team, that's a positive. Suton I thought played better in the second half - that's a positive. We only had four or five turnovers in the second half - that's a positive. Now let's get to the negatives. I'm very disappointed in Travis Walton's play. I single that out because he's a better player than he played. I'm not surprised with Naymick, Suton, Ibok and Marquise, what those guys went through. As I said when I walked into my locker room after the game, I saw a bunch of heads with sweat on them that I haven't seen with sweat on them, usually they have just warmups on. We have played just a huge number of people that have never played more than a minute or two at Michigan State. The loss of Raymar Morgan really did hurt this team. He's been starting the last two weeks and all of a sudden we have to move different people in, so that would be a good excuse on my part, but I wasn't really satisfied with myself. We didn't look like we executed very well, and we're going to have a lot to work on.
Another positive would be playing a game like this against a good team. Don't kid yourself, it's a good team. I'm not going to kid anybody, should we have beaten this team by more than we did? Yes, but I'm also not going to kid anybody, that is a very well-coached, good team. The coaching points we're going to get out of this game are going to be enormous. The film sessions will be a lot longer than the practices, because I think that there are a lot of things that we can get out of it, including some good plays we executed down the stretch - back door plays and some good plays that I think teach you a little bit about your team too.
On Drew Neitzel's play...
He's got two years worth of pent-up in him, where we didn't rely on him, and that's who he is. I've been there through Scott Skiles, I've been there through guys like Respert, and I've watched J.J. Redick do some things. We didn't do a good job getting it to him, and he forced a few early, but I don't blame him. He's home, and he hasn't had that freedom for two years. I was mostly pleased with how Drew played, considering the rest of us didn't play so good. He was open on a couple plays where we didn't get him the ball in time, they did a nice job stepping up on him, we could have slipped, but we just threw the ball to the tuba section. It's disappointing, but I think there are things we can correct without having major heart surgery, and we can just correct those things. I'm not concerned about him, but I'm going to have to feed him more, make sure he doesn't cramp up, but he's in great shape. He's really shot the ball well, he shot it a lot better than tonight in practice.
Grand Valley State Head Coach Ric Wesley
On the outcome...
We're all disappointed in the outcome. We had thought coming into the game we'd have a veteran team with a lot of guys back from a good team last year. Tom has got, basically, a brand new team, so we hoped that we'd be competitive and have a chance. I'm proud of our guys for competing hard and I'm just disappointed because coming down the stretch, we made a lot of mistakes. We just can't do that, particularly against a good team, a well-coached team like Michigan State. My hat's off to them.
On Drew Neitzel's 27-point game...
Drew Neitzel, who was the one guy we thought pretty much can't let beat us, pretty much did. He had a great game, shot the ball well and we didn't make a good enough adjustment on him so my hats off to him.
On what problems helped Michigan State comeback...
I thought my big guys got tired. I was disappointed in my big guys. I thought we could play better inside. We were doing OK there in the first half there and we were making some shots. We were kind of getting some offense from our defense. We try to be a good defensive team. In the second half, they shot 52 percent. In the second half, they settled down. They made the adjustments so it wasn't as easy, so we had to go to our half-court offense to score. We never really were able to establish the low post in there and that's tough. It's kind of like football. If you get that ground game, it opens up the passing game. We didn't really get our inside game established. Even with that, we were still in the game. Then down the stretch, we had a bad out-of-bounds play, we made adjustments in defensive situations and we didn't carry it out. We had a number of little things in the last five minutes that cost us.
On coming so close to pulling off the upset of Michigan State...
I know everybody says, `Oh, it's Michigan State.' We're all Michigan State fans. They have an unbelievable program, but we have a pretty good program, too. We had a lot of success last year, so we're just stupid enough to think we're supposed to win games. Tom has a really young team. He has a bunch of new guys trying to find themselves. We have four starters back, so I would hope we have a little more cohesiveness and maybe a little bit of an advantage or something to neutralize their size and strength. That's what was disappointing down the stretch; we weren't as cohesive as I'd like to be.
On the exhibition being held at Van Andel Arena...
First of all, I just appreciate Michigan State for giving us this opportunity. This was a great thing for our team, a great thing for our University and really a good thing for West Michigan basketball in general. We really appreciate them and Huntington Bank and the Van Andel staff putting this together.
