BIG TEN CONFERENCE MEN'S BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT

March 9, 2022

Micah Shrewsberry

Jalen Pickett

Sam Sessoms

Gainbridge Fieldhouse

Penn State Nittany Lions

Postgame Press Conference

Penn State - 60, Minnesota - 51

MODERATOR: We are joined by Penn State Head Coach Micah Shrewsberry, Senior Guard Jalen Pickett and Senior Guard Sam Sessoms.

Coach why don't you start with an opening statement and then we'll take questions for the students.

COACH MICAH SHREWSBERRY: First off, I want to congratulate Minnesota on the season that they had. And even tonight they were undermanned and like you prepare and you get to game time and EJ Stephens is not available and you play five guys and those guys, they fought the entire season. I don't know if like Big Ten voting and stuff gets out there, it probably doesn't, the awards do. but Ben Johnson got one of my votes for Conference Coach of the Year because of what he's done, how his team played the entire season, what they did, how they were in games, the stuff that he runs out of time-outs. He got one of my votes and hats off to them. But I'm proud of these guys for how they played, how we battled and we're excited to move on and play again tomorrow.

Q. Jalen, it looked like you were sort of getting in the zone there in the second half and then you started talking a little bit coming down the court. After you made that step-back three, did you start to feel it then, that you were taking over offensively?

JALEN PICKETT: Yeah, they were going under a lot of balls, creates a different thing. So I made that shot and I was more talking to myself like, good shot, just keep going. Sometimes you got to do that to try to get your own energy when you're tired.

Q. Speaking of being tired, it looked like you guys took advantage of their fatigue a little bit in the second half to find some good looks and slowly build your cushion. Jalen Pickett?

JALEN PICKETT: Oh, definitely, Coach Shrewsberry does a great job with the game plan. We knew we wanted to (inaudible) down, and those guys play a lot of minutes. So we knew as the game goes on, we had to make a run. We just had to keep following the game plan.

Q. Sam, you got switched on to a couple bigger guys, especially Jamison Battle a few times, but sort of fought through it. What is sort of the level of buy-in that you've taken defense, especially later in the season?

SAM SESSOMS: Really just listen to the game plan, like Jalen said. We going to every game knowing who's like the top two guys offensively, so we knew going into the game they were going to try to attack some of our smaller guys because we play a small line up. And Coach Shrews' just been reiterating all we -- just fight them, fight them. There was one point in time I asked if we can just -- might not switch and he said no, just keep fighting, and I did a pretty good job and we got them out of that set.

Q. Sam, as you guys are now in the tournament in your last year, how do you want to look back on the season and on your legacy at Penn State?

SAM SESSOMS: I just want to win with this group of guys. I obviously want to win every year, but Coach Shrews said in the beginning of the year this is like the last chance, this is the only chance you'll get with the group of guys that's in the room. We've got some seniors, John, Greg, Jaheam, who's not going to be here next year and this is the last chance we get to win with this group in particular. Just want to live in the moment with this team and hopefully just be remembered as a winner.

Q. Down the stretch, you guys looked really comfortable in this situation, kind of another gritty game. That's been kind of your M.O. all year. How did the experiences that you guys have been through this season help you close this one out?

JALEN PICKETT: It was really important for us, Coach put up before the game, like we would so many close -- like nine close games like under six points or something like that. So we've been in this spot before and we've got a lot of seniors, so we felt really comfortable and we were connected and we knew what we needed to do every time down the floor on offense and defense.

Q. I guess for Jalen, it looked like, as John kind of asked, you had some success after that three where you were kind of talking to yourself. What does that do for you emotionally, right, talking to yourself, trying to get yourself into it? How does that impact you to kind of help you, I guess, feed after your own words?

JALEN PICKETT: It's important. Just trying to go on to the next possession. I made a couple mistakes defensively. Coach Shrews got on me and I'm better than that. And sometimes I get in my own head, so I got to let it go sometimes, but sometimes I use it as motivation to just keep going and keep pushing through.

Q. Micah, you guys went to the ball tonight with Payton Willis quite a bit there. What made you go to that decision and how do you feel like you guys executed that, given it sort of opened things up for Jamison a little bit with the spacing?

COACH MICAH SHREWSBERRY: If you allow him to get comfortable, which we saw in game one, he just killed us, he killed us. He got the shots he wanted, he hit Curry where he wanted to have it. Like he just tore us apart offensively. So we did it a little bit in the second time we played them and then tonight we had those guys just pick him up full and try to pressure him as much as possible. It still opens you up to Curry's pops, but the further out he was on the floor, now Curry's catching it a little bit out further on the floor. Now he's not in the spot where he's comfortable catching it and shooting it where they killed us the last time. So that's why we extended it a little bit further up. I thought Dallion and Sam did a good job picking him up and then we switched it some with certain matchups with Pickett late and just tried to keep different guys on him to mix it up.

Q. My question for you, Coach, there's a couple games this season where you guys like were stagnant in the first half struggling to get going, especially against like Rutgers, Northwestern at home on Senior Night, but what do you tell your team, especially Seth Lundy when he doesn't hit a field goal? What do you tell your team when they're not hitting those shots?

COACH MICAH SHREWSBERRY: There were a lot more games when we were stagnant in the first half as well. You just named the conference, but we don't have time for that. We just talked about in at halftime. I felt like we played a little bit rushed. We see what they do, right? We prepare for what they do and then you try and attack it, but sometimes it takes a little bit of time to see if they've changed something or to kind of settle into the game. I didn't feel like we settled into the game in the first half. We were playing pretty fast, we weren't allowing our screeners to get in the right position. We missed some shots around the rim that we usually make. So we just talked about really slowing down in the second half. And if you look at us throughout the season, the last 10 minutes of the game was when we played our best offense and you get to that point and I feel like we know where exactly we're tracking, what shots we want to get, how they're guarding us and we really settle into the game. You know, hopefully our defense can keep us there until we get to that point, and it usually does, it usually does. I'd love for us to play a lot better early on, but as long as it takes until we start clicking, that's what we usually do.

Q. You guys haven't won on the road since, I think, Northwestern. What was the mental block maybe like to get over any hurdles that may have subsided since then?

COACH MICAH SHREWSBERRY: I don't know. I think we've played well at times on the road. We haven't played 40 minutes consistently. We've played in stretches. We've usually hurt ourselves with turnovers in those segments, usually in the first half where now we're a little bit sluggish or we're behind and then we get down some and then we have to waste our energy fighting back or climbing back. But our guys stay with it. I told them before the game and I showed them, I was actually watching the Nebraska-northwestern game and they said we led the Big Ten with nine losses six points or fewer. You know, one, that's tough, like to lose those games, but it also shows you how resilient this group is that you keep bouncing back. It would be easy to just say we're going to mail it in on the road, but they fight back and scratch and claw and do what they need to do to get it to a close game and then give ourselves a chance at the end. That's what we want to continue. We live to fight another day and if it's close, we'll feel comfortable because we've been in a lot of close games this year.

Q. Micah, Jalen Pickett, 22 points tonight and he looked especially locked in in the second half. What did you kind of make of his performance overall tonight, and then especially in the second half down the stretch, what did you kind of see out of him tonight?

COACH MICAH SHREWSBERRY: He's a good player. Like if you go through and look, when I got the stat packet at the end of the season so I could do my all-conference voting, you look at leading scorers in our conference and he averaged about 14. Like his name's in that list right in the middle. You look at blocks, you look at steals, you look at assists, you look at assists-to-turnover ratio, the guy's all over the place in terms of what he does. He's played that way pretty much the entire season. He was slow out of the gates and he struggled a little bit early, but once he got comfortable, he's played that way. He's a good player, he's a good player. No matter what level you come from or where you went to originally, if you can play, you can play and he can play. He plays at his own pace, he gets where he wants to go, he makes tough shots, he scores around the basket. They go under him, he steps back and hits a three. He makes the pass to John there late when he jumps up like he's gonna shoot and dumps it down to him, like that's savvy. That's understanding the game, that's understanding the situation. The guy doesn't get rattled and the guy never comes out of the game and he like doesn't complain one bit. That takes a lot, takes a lot of heart and he's a competitor, he's a warrior.

Q. You only played seven guys. I wonder how you go about handling the next 24 hours or so heading into the next game in terms of guys kind of getting to where they need to be physically and rest-wise and that sort of thing.

COACH MICAH SHREWSBERRY: Yeah, we trust our guys. We have great support staff and we got our guys out of here as quickly as possible to get back to the hotel, to eat and then start the recovery process. It's something that like we were expecting to come here and win and play tomorrow, right, so we've had this in our mind of what our plan's going to look like and how we're going to get ready to play this next game. My expertise is not that, right, but you hire good people and then you allow them to work. Justin and Greg will do a great job getting our guys ready. We'll go and walk through our game plan, our scouting report, we'll get our guys off their feet and we'll come in here, and the one thing is, like no matter if they're tired or not, I guarantee they're going to come in here and fight tomorrow.

Q. To piggyback off what Daniel asked, when do you sort of notice Jalen getting into those sets and getting down to the post more and when do you start to make the concerted effort to get him the ball in those situations?

COACH MICAH SHREWSBERRY: Yeah, you look at it and it might be something that you see early, but you can't go to it exclusively, right, and give them a time to adjust. There's some things you've got to keep, you've got to hold. Like you see something, like we may run something. We ran a play at the start of the game and Dallion got a wide open shot, right? I'm like, we're going to hold this and run it again in the second half. If I run it back to back, they're going to know how to guard it, they're going to think about it, right? They're going to figure out what to do. Same thing with Pickett and those post-ups or whatever it may be, you've just got to hold some things and wait a little bit and be patient. Like if you do it before halftime a bunch, now they've got halftime to talk about it, now they've got this. If you wait a little bit, right, now they don't have as many times to get in the huddle and meet and talk about what they're doing and change up to different things. We've got a lot of tricks, I've got a lot of tricks up my sleeve. I know it doesn't look like it when we're balling out and getting 60 points or 52 points or whatever it may be, but every once in a while I'll throw a few tricks out there, we'll get a bucket.

Q. Micah, you touched on how your offense really steps up in the final 10 minutes. On the other side of the ball, you hold Minnesota to 2-12 shooting if my numbers are correct over the final eight minutes. What do you credit that performance fro your defense to?

COACH MICAH SHREWSBERRY: We've guarded like that all year, all year. Our guys, our assistant coaches do an unbelievable job of getting them ready. Like Adam Fisher had our guys ready, like we're watching film and they're calling out what's coming next. Mike Farrelly has tomorrow and he'll have our guys ready the same exact way. They do a great job of getting these guys ready.

And then it's all about our discipline defensively, right? You see me like lose my mind or it looks like I'm losing my mind. I know it looks like that a lot, but it's usually things that we control defensively that we don't do. When we do what we can control, we're really good defensively. We make people take tough shots, we give them one shot and we go and rebound it and our guys have done that all season and they just dig in deeper and deeper and as the game goes on, you just keep wearing on people, wearing on people, wearing on people and hopefully you're taking their legs.

Now, some of those open 3s, it just doesn't quite feel the same, right? That was an old like Brad Stephens, this guy I used to work for, he used to always say that you just take away what they want to do best, you just squeeze the life out of people and now the one time they get that open 3, they haven't seen it all game and it usually doesn't go in because they're not getting that shot that they normally get every single time. That's what our guys are doing. They're just taking away A and making you go to B, and then we're guarding B as tough as possible and making you go to C, and now you're not working on C, that's a shot you've never practiced in your life. Now we're contesting that shot, we're challenging that shot, we're hitting people on the glass and then we're going down the other end.