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MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY MEDIA CONFERENCEMarch 17, 2009Tom IzzoCOACH IZZO: We are in the NCAA tournament. That's the good news. We're on the road. I think there's some good news to that since it seems we have played better and been more focused on the road for the most part. We're playing a team that has got two very good players. They have two very good three-point shooters and a very solid group after that that seems very well coached, good defensively, not real big, and as it would happen, a 2:15 game. You've got to worry more about your team in some ways, even though we're preparing very well for Robert Morris, we have to worry more about our team getting better. And that's been an issue. You know, we did not get better at the Big Ten tournament. But I still am going back and reviewing those films, looking at it as we played poorly defensively in that Ohio State game, but we still missed a bunch of good shots, so I have no problem with the selection or with the number of good shots or even the execution of the offense. It was just making shots. So hopefully this week is going to be for getting better with us. We worked on us a lot yesterday, worked on some Robert Morris, we'll be working on Robert Morris all week, and yet we'll be studying films of the other two teams as you have to do in a tournament like this. Questions? Q. You talked a few times about not wanting to put too much pressure on your team. Do you think your team feels a little bit, being the No. 2 seed with the Final Four in Detroit and all that? Do you think they have felt that at all? COACH IZZO: I've said a lot I have trouble reading this team. I think it's more fragile than most teams that I've had. I think there's a variety of different reasons, but I can't say that I've read them as well to even figure out whether they're feeling the pressure. I don't think so. I think maybe if we were a one seed it would have been more pressure, but I don't think as a two seed anybody looks as a two any different than a three, four or five. It's like getting to the Final Four. You're a member of the four teams; you'll definitely remember the team that won it but you won't remember the teams coming up to that. I think this is the same way. If you're a one seed you want a four. I think there's a little more pressure on us because it's in Detroit, but that's good pressure, and I think it should be something that drives you instead of something that frightens you or makes you nervous. I would hope that means that we would play our best basketball. We've talked about it for a year and a half. With some recruits I've talked about it for two and a half years. It's one of those rare opportunities you get an opportunity to play in your own home state. I mean, that doesn't happen to many schools anywhere. And so when it does, and it comes around like Halley's Comet, you try to take advantage of it. That's the only thing. I mean, we understand we're not penciled into a Final Four, that's for sure, and we're not penciled in to beat Robert Morris, so we've got a long way to go. But do I hope it's a goal? Sure. Do I hope it drives us? Sure. Do I hope it makes us nervous or feel the pressure? I don't think so. I really don't believe in that, and I don't see that being a factor in how we play. Q. Travis pretty much cleaned up with the awards last night at the banquet. Knowing the importance and the value he has on this team, how can he help you get this team better right now and maybe even in some ways be an extension of you at this critical time, stage of the season? COACH IZZO: Play better. He didn't have a great tournament, and he's got to play better. I think this is the ultimate time when everybody has got to do what they do. Durrell has to make shots and Chris. That's what they do. Travis has to check and lead, that's what he does. Kalin has to score and deliver the ball, that's what he does. We're going to have to get some inside play from a variety of different people, which I think we can. So if Travis can do anything for this team or me, it would be, number one, play better, and number two, play with a desperation that this is my last go-around. I think that's good pressure, not bad pressure. Q. I know you're focusing obviously on Robert Morris and what's ahead, but have you had a chance to look at the rest of the Midwest region, and what are your thoughts on that? COACH IZZO: The only thing I've really looked at, I looked at the two teams that we play the next game because that's that weekend. I haven't really looked -- I know Kansas is in it, I know Dayton is in it. It must be West Virginia is in it, right? I don't really even know. I know Louisville is in it. I really honestly haven't looked past the three teams that we could play in Minneapolis. That is one thing I have gotten decent at learning how to do just take care of the weekends. You have to know what's going on the whole weekend, not just one game. You have to put that in perspective and plan for the one game. You can't move on until you win that one. What I haven't done is I haven't taken a minute to look at the country, which kind of bothers me. I like to look at the different brackets, and it's just been a lot of things that we're trying to do in a short period of time here, and with the banquet last night, I'll tell you tomorrow I'll get to do a little bit more or maybe get a little time on the plane to look at that, but I really haven't done that yet. Q. Do you think that there's a general perception that Michigan State is the stereotypical plodding Big Ten team, and if so, how does that help you in the first couple rounds of the tournament? COACH IZZO: Well, it helps us against Robert Morris because I think they want to get up-and-down. I think the other two teams, I haven't seen as much of USC, I've seen more of Boston College, and they're kind of that way. They're going to run that flex. And USC has got some tremendous athletes and size. So they're two different teams. They are two different teams, and they're definitely different than Robert Morris, of course. I'm just looking forward to not playing some teams that know everything we do. No matter what their style is, I think one of the strengths of our team is we can play different styles and we can play different sizes. But I don't think that that's going to bother us as much as just getting to a point where you can run some stuff and everybody doesn't know, including the trainer on the other team's bench. It keeps going back to these 18 games and two in the tournament, it just seems like we've been playing, playing, playing the same teams, and I'm sure every conference goes through the same thing, although in some of them like the Big East they don't play everybody and things like that. For us that's going to be a welcome sight. Q. Where is Durrell right now with his confidence and how do you handle him this week? COACH IZZO: Well, I've looked at a couple different ways I'm trying to handle him. We've talked to him, and there's no doubt that the last ten games he's struggled, and that included games -- I think a lot of people want to put that on, well, since he hasn't started, it was way before that. I will say this: What I've asked Durrell to do is what I've asked a lot of shooters to do over the past, and that's just keep working on it. The other night we didn't practice, of course, in between games. We had a walk-through, and he asked if he could get into a gym, so we got him in a local high school gym just so he could shoot himself. So he's doing what he's supposed to be doing, and that's keep working on it. I'm really proud of Durrell about that. He's getting back in the gym and working; Durrell Summers has done that. Confidence, as I stated early in the year, middle of the year and end of the year, I don't think coaches can give it to people like people think. I think it's got to be earned, and yet what a coach can do is stick by him if he's doing everything that he can do to work his way out of that. And he's already been a great shooter, he's done it before, he's done it in college before, and you know, we tried to use the example of the kid from Tennessee last year who struggled and then came on a little bit. I just keeping asking him to work his way out of it, and he's doing that, so I'm cool with what Durrell does. Do we need him? Yeah. We need somebody to shoot. I think he's struggling, shooting 16, 17 percent the last ten games from three. At one time he was shooting in the 40s. That's a big difference. And when you have good offense, it usually puts a little more hip in your hop on your defensive end, and I think sometimes Durrell's offense affects his defense or his rebounding because he's a phenomenal rebounder, and yet I understand that. I think for a pure scorer, which a Durrell or Chris are, it's just the nature of the beast. You know, it's easy to say don't let it affect other parts of your game, but if you're not doing well on the strongest suit of your game, it does affect other parts. But I love his attitude, I love the way he's handled it. We're trying to talk to him. We're going to try to get some motivational tapes. We're going to try to show him some games when he played well, try all the tricks that we can play. But eventually he's still got to put the ball in the basket, and that's Durrell. Q. On the Chappell kid, I think he leads them in points, rebounds, scoring. Can you talk a little bit about him, and did you cross paths with him during recruiting? COACH IZZO: I didn't, but he's from Cincinnati and he's a strong -- I think he's a prototype pro guard. To me he's almost that good. An area that I didn't know he was as strong is he really passes the ball well, and he can score off the dribble, he can score off the set, he can shoot deep threes. He's strong, very strong, handles the ball pretty well, and even seems to defend pretty well. He was freshman of the year and he's worked himself up to MVP of the conference. He was freshman of the conference his first year and MVP his last year, and so he's really made some strides. He's been consistent for all his years there, and I think that is why he's going to be a handful for us. We've got to make sure a guy like that doesn't go off. I think they beat Wagner 100-some to 50-some and they had 14 or 15 threes in the game, so they're capable of shooting threes. He's a big reason and a big asset. Q. It seems like teams win all sorts of different ways in the tournament, three-pointers, not three-pointers. As an NCAA tournament veteran like yourself, is there something that you always think can work in the tournament as opposed to things that come and go, an ingredient that always -- COACH IZZO: I think every coach will always tell you your defense can be solid and your rebounding can be solid and that works to your advantage most times, and that is true. I think one thing that could work to your advantage is not turning the doggone ball over, which we struggle with some, because especially if you're a good rebounding team, if you're getting shots up, you get a chance to get them back. If you don't get a shot up, you have no chance to get it back and it has no chance to go in, so it's like double damage. You know, I don't think normally a lot of teams win or go deep, deep just with the three ball. I think it's got to be a factor. It should be a bigger factor for us, but we've had two of our key guys not shooting it well for the last eight, ten games, so we haven't utilized it as much as we were in the middle, and hopefully some of that will come back. I think what always works during tournament time is your defense, what always works is your rebounding, and what always works is not turning the ball over so you have opportunities, and we do two of those three pretty well. Q. You're in your 50s now; you've been doing this for more than a decade. What's still fresh and new and exciting about this process, about getting no sleep in March? COACH IZZO: I think as I try to tell my team, you have a lot of years you dream about going to the tournament, dream about being a Final Four team, now that we've been to one before. I never dreamed about it as much before we went, but once you go and go a couple times, then it becomes a goal every year. And yet realistically I can think of three years where I thought we had a legitimate chance, and one of them was in 2000, not '99, probably because I hadn't been there, didn't know. One was in 2001, and I thought this year we had a legitimate chance, which means one of 15, 16 teams. In 2005 at the beginning of the year, you know, I just didn't know where this team was. We really didn't have a point guard that year. I didn't know where they were. I thought they could be a good team, but I didn't know if they could be a Final Four team. Coaches have to be realistic with themselves, not to the teams always, not to the media ever -- no, always, and not to the fans, but they do have to be realistic when they look in the ceiling, which we do a lot at night, and I felt like this was one of three years that we had a real chance to get there. But you can have chances and lose the first game and you can have chances and get there. But I think if I rolled up my piece of paper like every year that you do and you mark down your wins and losses and what you project good and bad, this is one of those years that you could project that you have a chance. I always think there's probably 15, 16, 14, 12 teams that have a legitimate chance, and then there's four or five teams that have a real chance. We're in that legitimate chance. So that excites me. I think there's nothing better than the tournament, and as you asked earlier, as it's stated a lot of times, my greatest weekend here was in Detroit. And so you'd have to be crazy not to have a little bit more emphasis put on it, have a little bit more excitement about it with the chance to play in your state. It seems so far. It seems like that tournament is about in June when you look at it now, and that's because you're just honing in on this one game and you realize you've got to win one game and one game and then you take a big breath and you kind of go to the next weekend. So that's probably what excites me most is I think we're good enough. What depresses me most or doesn't excite me most is we haven't been as consistent as I'd like to be. I think some reasons are evident and easy, and some reasons are difficult. You know, why aren't we shooting the ball better? Why haven't we been as good at home as we've been on the road? I mean, that was a strange one for me this year. I really never figured it out except you always think of distractions and things that happen at home that don't happen on the road, and maybe that's where our youth -- because we have more young guys playing than most real good teams. That's the way I look at both those things. Is that a good answer for a 50-year-old? Q. For a coach who's pushing 60 like you are (laughter), you say that this is a hard team to get a real accurate read on, that they're fragile or however you want to phrase it. But are you concerned that this team might not be ready to embrace the challenge that's ahead of them, that you have a chance to play an hour away from here in the Final Four? COACH IZZO: Yeah, I guess I'm a little -- when I say the fragileness and all that, we keep going back to I just don't think we've -- it's been a strange beat-'em-up year for a good year. I mean, the two strange things are the number of injuries that were significant, and the home and away, the way we played. I mean, 14 and 4 on the road, and 12 and 2 at home is pretty good, but not as good as the 14 and 4 on the road. Every time I think I've got a handle on it, I look at it and somebody else gets hurt or does something else or gets sick, and I try to use it as an excuse in my mind. But all that being said, we win our league by four games. I think I get like everybody else, you lose perspective or you're so geared on the big picture that you forget all the little pictures and the little steps along the way. Winning this conference to me this year is phenomenal. To me the way we played in the Big Ten tournament was disappointing. I thought we had one good half of basketball, the second half of Minnesota. And yet, you know, we've gone to a Final Four losing the first game of the tournament in an upset, and we've gone there winning it. I mean, I guess it's hard to say what you look at when you've been through a lot of different scenarios to get to the same place. Now, the greatest scenario for a coach was more like 2000 and 2001 where you were consistently pretty good, you knew you were tough enough, and one year we had one major injury, but it was one injury the whole time, and then once he came back I knew he wasn't going to miss a beat. The other year we went almost injury-free and we were pretty solid the whole way. So am I concerned about it? You know, I'd have to say a little bit, but I think I would be concerned about it no matter what. I just think these guys are maybe -- I'm trying to figure out a good word for it. They've been through a lot, they've accomplished a lot, they've played pretty well under some tough circumstances sometimes, and yet we're not where we need to be to get -- to be able to say, boy, this is a team that's going to Detroit. That's why when all the people nationally said, the eyeball look, I said that here, I don't like our eyeball look. I agreed with them that the eyeball look -- but I think a lot of people's eyeball look, I mean, there's teams that have lost three out of five games at the end of the year and are projected to get to Detroit. So I think everybody has their moments. This year is a year when I'm not sure you could feel consistently good about one team. That's a lot. Now, you can feel good about Louisville. If you look how they finished, who else would you feel good about of the top 10, 12 teams in the country? Not many teams. Q. Do you give any thought to, you know, one of your biggest selling points when you walk into a living room is if you stay four years you're going to make it to a Final Four. Do you give any thought to Travis at this time? COACH IZZO: I give thought to Travis. I don't think of the living rooms much anymore, but if someone hears that, they say I don't want to stay four years, I'm staying two years and I'm gone. That's not as big a selling point as it used to be, but it's still a pretty neat thing and it's a big thing to Travis because he hasn't been to one, even G and ID and Quise have been there, not in uniform but have been there -- I guess they were in uniform come to think of it, but didn't play. So yeah, I want everybody to go away with something. Travis has had something our other guys haven't had, and that's a Big Ten Championship, and yet I think this was something that was important to him. I don't think you ever want to be the class that loses a streak. I think captain Duke I back here had -- didn't you go to the tournament your senior year? But you see what I mean. Guys remember things like that ten years later. Is that one of our battle cries? I don't look at the living rooms of the recruiting as much anymore as I used to because of how the landscape has changed. But I do look at it for the players that have come here and the experiences they have in their four years, and I'd like to keep that streak going for his sake, my sake and a lot of other people's sakes. Q. Despite the inconsistency and the unknown, the eyeball test on the individual parts of this team are something you still are encouraged by? COACH IZZO: Oh, yeah. You know, I mean, we said as a staff, we haven't had a lot of games -- right before Ray went down in I think the Kansas game and maybe even after he went down in the Minnesota game, we had a lot of guys that played well together, and I thought we played exceptionally well. But there hasn't been as many of those games but there hasn't been as many of those games where we've had all those guys there, all the moving parts, the key moving parts, let's put it that way. But I don't think there's any question we've got a point guard that can play with anybody, and I don't think there was any question not only is G good enough but by committee in there right now with Marquise playing a little better and ID being able to be a guy that we can use against some big guys if we run into them and with Day-Day and Delvon making monstrous strides, we have enough people, parts to play different ways inside, and then it comes down to our primary guys. We've got a lock-down defender in Travis, we've got another great defender in Raymar, and then we've got some shooters that have to shoot. So yeah, as I look at the parts, the parts are all there, and I feel great about that. I'd just like to play a little better at the end. But reminding myself and having Jay Vincent at our thing last night and having the 30-year reunion, that team went through some losses at the end, didn't play as well, found a way to bounce back; we've done that before. So I have enough things to use here sooner or later if I think we need that or if I think we need some other motivational tactic. I think we have enough that we could apply to because of what this team has accomplished. And I've said all year, as we know, I've used some wrong words and some right words, but whether it's fragile, whether it's inconsistent, whether it's dysfunctional, whether it's -- and sometimes those mean different things. Dysfunctional to me doesn't mean my team is as dysfunctional as maybe the offense is because we're not as smooth, and I've used all those and I still believe some of them. They're just facts. But I don't think we can downplay what we've accomplished, either. I mean, you can't win 26 games, the teams we've played, how we've played, where we've played with the injuries we've had, you can't win 26 games unless you've got a very good team. I would like to see that very good team all play well together, and I can't think of a better time to do that than the week coming up. I think Robert Morris will be a great way to start out, and hopefully we get to move on. I guess we're going to do everything here since the roundtable gets too round, so if there are a couple more I'll take them here. Q. Can you think back on some of the other rounds that the team really showed up? It seems like maybe the 2003, the Colorado-Florida weekend. I'm trying to think back to the times when you almost looked like a different team from the end of the Big Ten to the tournament. COACH IZZO: Yeah, you know, that was one. I still think playing Duke and Kentucky, it was just somebody different that we hadn't played much. You know, if you don't play them a lot, you don't study them every day, you don't know everything they do, I mean, you can do a lot in four days, not nearly as much in a one-day turnaround. So I think there's some advantages to getting into the tournament and playing different people. I really believe that everybody in our league, and TV has made it even more so now, now with the Big Ten network it's even more so, where every single game is on and it's on where you can get it and you can get it in high quality and you can study it. There's different ways; we can get it over the computer now. There's so many ways that -- everybody has got an extra staff member it seems, so you're going to know the teams inside and out when you're in league play. That doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't still win, but it means it's harder to do things, and I think that's one thing our league has done a pretty good job of is knowing each other. Q. (No microphone.) COACH IZZO: You know, we had a good practice yesterday. We didn't practice on Sunday, but we had a good practice yesterday, and I think what I've got to keep remembering is those freshmen are going through it for the first time, and I look at those seniors that are like grizzled guys that have been through it a million times, and still trying to bring those two together. But I think they are excited. That's one thing they said right after is it's going to be fun to play somebody different. I think every group I've always had, since we've always had the Big Ten tournament since we've been a tournament team, it seems like after every one everybody is saying it's going to be fun to play somebody that doesn't know everything we do. It's kind of fun for coaches to get the challenge of trying to figure out what other teams are going to do, too. We're looking at these games, and if you look at Boston College, they play a different style. It's not the Princeton style, it's a complete different style. If you look at USC, they play triangle in two, box in one, they play different defenses. For the most part Robert Morris is a man-to-man team that plays a little bit of zone but runs some very good stuff offensively. So it's a fun time for a coach. And I think the players are looking forward to playing against different people for sure. Q. (No microphone.) COACH IZZO: You know, I think all of us, we just call it something different. Some call it dribble drive. We all run plays, don't kid yourself. I'd say the closest -- Illinois does, Purdue does. I think we all run similar things. The Northwesterns of the world is a different similar, and I would say a Boston College the way they run it is kind of different, but I'll bet you 90 percent of the time they're going to run double staggers, they're going to run pick-and-rolls, do all those kind of things. You cover them differently according to the personnel they have running them; if they're good pick-and-pop guys, then you'd cover it one way, or whether they're good pick-and-roll guys and you'd cover it another way, whether they're good coming off it with a guard who can shoot it, good coming off it with a guard who's just a distributor. That's what makes the difference in how you cover different things. I don't know if that matters much to be honest with you. Q. Have you talked to 40-something-year-old Brian Gregory? COACH IZZO: I have talked to Brian, and I talked to Jimmy, and both of them are excited. Brian has got West Virginia and Jimmy has got Arizona. Wojcik has got Northwestern in the NIT. Brian knows he's got his work cut out for him. They lost a key player too about a month ago in their point guard, and they have struggled a little bit since then, but still, I think, won 25 games. He's had a hell of a year. And Jimmy winning the league tournament, that was a special treat for him. Q. (No microphone.) COACH IZZO: Well, you know, BG has been there once as a head coach and then he's been there with us a couple times and was in the Final Four thing, so he's done the whole gamut. We did talk to him the other night, and you don't get many chances for mistakes now because I think players sometimes don't realize that, and he's got some young guys, too, and yet they have conference tournaments. So conference tournaments, at least that's one thing you get out of them is you realize if you mess up, you're done. Q. (No microphone.) COACH IZZO: Well, he does like to come in and get tapes, and then he takes them home and watches them on his little DVD player. The computer is easier with the playback stuff, but Travis has his own system. He does, he comes in every night after road games. He'll get picked up in the tunnel and drive up and run in there and pick up a tape, and he really gets a lot out of that. I said to him yesterday, well, I'm sure you watched at least three or four tapes, I've watched five. That's all we had on them. He named off the three or four that he had watched, and I laughed. So yeah, he does a lot with that, and I think he'll know them as well as we do, that's for sure. Q. (No microphone.) COACH IZZO: You know, I haven't asked him about that. I hope not as a player. Knowing Travis he probably has some, just because that's what he is. As a player I hope he's focusing on the first game and then we go from there. As the coaches we have to of course go beyond that. Q. Going off the concept of familiarity, there were a couple times in the Big Ten season where offense got bogged down, specifically in the Big Ten tournament, Ohio State, you threw the press on, and it really seemed to force the pace, get things moving a little bit, flowing a little better. Is that something -- COACH IZZO: You plan on doing a little bit of that in this tournament just because now we feel like we're all healthy and we can play and we know what we've got and where we can go. So yeah, you know, I think we'd like to try to pick up the pace, but it's always different at the end of a game when it's more helter-skelter and you can take those chances and teams aren't going to attack the same way because they're looking at the clock and things. Sometimes you can be fooled by that. But I think the one problem we had against Minnesota is we tried to extend too much in our half court, and after we got a lead we made some foolish plays, taking some chances down the stretch. We are going to try to speed up the process, though; that is definitely in the game plan. Q. One other thing about the '05 team, that was really a team without the big expectations, but it had a lot -- it was senior laden, it was a very veteran team. How would you compare these two clubs in terms of that? COACH IZZO: They were a little more in some ways stable, meaning I knew them better because of the Torbert, Bograkos groups, Hill, Anderson and those guys had been through a lot. They were driven because they hadn't won either one. They hadn't won a Big Ten. They were cut short on two of them that were down to the wire, and I think that helped drive them. You know, those seniors, too, all played a lot. This senior class maybe doesn't play as much, but they're similar in some ways, too. Expectations were probably higher than you'd think back then, not as high but higher than you think because we had a good junior, senior class. This year I think expectations are higher because I think we have a good team, but having the Final Four in Detroit, I think everybody's expectation in the whole state who are at any college are higher just because of that dream of getting to do something that very few people get to do. Number one, playing a Final Four, but number two, playing a Final Four in your state makes it even bigger. Q. Travis as you know is the toughest guy on the team, the leader of the team, much like Mateen was during his day. How much do you think Travis' personality has rubbed off on the team in making this team a tougher team? COACH IZZO: Well, the one thing that Mateen -- I try to tell Travis that he got his team to do more because he willed that on everybody and he made everybody play like with that sense of urgency that he has. I think sometimes Travis takes care of himself, and yet is really -- you've got to have more of that rub off. I mean, Quise and G are two of his best friends. G is his roommate and Quise is one of his best friends, and I keep telling him, you've got to rub harder. Osmosis isn't working. We've got to have a skin transplant here. But I think that's still Travis, just the way he plays and the way he is in the locker room, usually spills off onto those guys somewhat. He definitely, I think, is going to be a big key this week because when he is over-energized we seem to be a better team. Q. (No microphone.) COACH IZZO: Well, the 2005 team with Brown and Ager, we did that the whole year, but we had every guy healthy the whole year, and we had a heck of a rotation. I mean, every player knew when he was going in and what he was doing, and every player almost knew when he was coming out. I don't think we played one guy in the 30 minutes. Everybody was 28 to 22 or 23. That was the prototype phenomenal rotation that you don't get maybe very often as I learned this year. I still think we can play a little bit like that now, and I think we are going to have to put some pressure on. It's harder to wear teams down in the tournament, though, because of those hour, hour and a half time-outs that we have. Q. Where do you think Chris is with his game? COACH IZZO: He didn't shoot as well against Minnesota, but I thought he played well. He got good shots, he took one or two bad shots, every shooter is going to do that. But he's playing better defensively. He went in and got a couple big rebounds, he ran the court well. I mean, the things we grade out on, he did a much better this weekend. He's had a great two weeks of practice. Everybody is judged on does the ball go in the basket and did you win the game, and I understand that and I judge them the same way. But Chris is -- I think his whole -- I think Chris has matured a lot in the last month. He went through some real tough times, and I think he's kind of pulled his pants up and said, you know what, this is what I've got to do. I mean, at practices he's been great. I still think Chris and Durrell both could have big nights. If they ever have big nights together, we're going to be a real, real good team because you do need that outside shooting sometimes, and especially if we can be a fast breaking team. Both guys can rebound. Durrell we know is a phenomenal athlete, but Chris is a much better athlete than I give him credit for. The two of them on the wings sometime, then we can move Ray in some time, we could be as athletic and fast as any team, and if we play some of the teams in the tournament, that will be needed. Q. What is your primary message to Kalin Lucas heading into this tournament, and can you talk a little bit about his evolution over the season? COACH IZZO: Well, my primary message is going to be stay focused on the task at hand. I think tournament time, especially after you've garnished some awards, is a time when you -- stake focused is difficult, is really is difficult. It's not as easy as people think. Everybody handles success certain ways, everybody handles failures certain ways. But when you get into the tournament and you come in as a Player of the Year or one of the better guards in the conference or even in the country, I think a lot more eyes are on you. And what I've loved about Kalin over the year, two years, especially last year even more than this year, is his best games were in the biggest games, and these are all big games now, so I'm going to make sure I tell him to keep pushing the ball because I think that's when he's best, when he's in the open court, when he's looking for a shot but looking for the pass. I think if I had to take one thing that I'm going to say, don't go for home runs. Keep it simple. Keep it simple. Turnovers are going to be a factor in this tournament, as they are in every sport at every level. Still possessions matter, and everybody laughs about all the scoring in the Big Ten, but if you look at last week, those conference tournaments, scoring was down for every conference, because that's the way it's played. And I'm sure for the most part I would be willing to bet that in the NCAA tournament that you'll see that happen, too, which means possessions are more important, which means turnovers are even more important than they are during the regular season. End of FastScripts |
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