Closing thoughts from win No. 400
This is Denny in for Joe. It was an emotional night at the Breslin Center for Wednesday night's Michigan State win over Minnesota, which gave MSU coach Tom Izzo the 400th win of his career.
In terms of breaking down the game, it was a whole lot of Draymond Green. The senior forward went for 22 points, 14 rebounds and six assists on 9-for-11 shooting in what Izzo called one of the best performances he's seen out of one of his players. It was a pretty fitting performance for a pretty monumental milestone. It wasn't just a lot of jumpers either, Green made nice moves to the basket, he hit 3-pointers, shots where he was falling away from the basket, everything. He definitely earns an A+ on the grade sheet tonight and Minnesota coach Tubby Smith said he was the difference maker. No one can really disagree.
Branden Dawson had another solid outing and has showed what he can do when he is playing every minute with intensity and devotion. He had 16 points and on a night where Keith Appling was off, they needed someone else to step up in order to win. Dawson was that player on Wednesday night.
For those wondering where Travis Trice was, Izzo said he had a bad hip flexor and could not go for the game against the Golden Gophers. Izzo did say that he will probably rest for the remainder of the week and then be good to go for the Spartans' road game against Illinois on Jan. 31. While we didn't see any of Trice, we did get a Russell Byrd sighting. Byrd made his only shot from the field (a 3-pointer) and finished with five points in seven minutes.
Finally, how about Adreian Payne and Derrick Nix in the post? This game was designed for a Payne-Nix combination the minute Trevor Mbakwe went down with an ACL injury against Dayton in November. The duo effectively did a number of Ralph Sampson III, who did finish with 10 points but was also saddled with foul trouble for much of the game. Both Payne and Nix effectively ran the floor well and like Izzo said earlier in the week, he had two effective 20 minute per game players (Payne played 24 minutes and Nix played 17). Payne had a hot start, scoring MSU's first basket with a tip in and then making a nice turnaround jumper to give MSU their first four points of the game.
It's good that this team will get a little bit of a break between Minnesota and Illinois to digest Izzo's 400th win and then get back to work in a tough Big Ten race. But, if you heard Izzo at the podium tonight, it doesn't sound like he'll have a hard time moving on to going for win No. 401:
"I said at the press conference and I said it now. It isn't humbling. They asked me on TV 'what went through your mind' and I said 'that I was 517 behind Krzyzewski.' It's hard to be real excited about something like that. Any milestone that you can share in front of your home fans, with your people; the 300th was great to be here with everybody, the 400th, I gues was great to be here with everybody. And to win it against a program that was so classy. I appreciate that too. It was kind of a grind out win. We weren't great, they werent't great, we just kind of ground it out and that was probably the way I needed to get a win here," Izzo said.
