Thankful and Rejuvenated Tom Izzo, Took Time Today to Reflect on the 2014-2015 Season and What It Meant to Him.

Tom Izzo met with the media today for nearly two and a half hours to recap the 2014-2015 season. Nearly one hour of that was on the record, meaning it was

Tom Izzo met with the media today for nearly two and a half hours to recap the 2014-2015 season. Nearly one hour of that was on the record, meaning it was information that we could report. He started the session strong, before taking our questions really sharing his narrative on the campaign.

Here is his opening statement word for word. The session ended moments ago:

I don’t really know how to start with this year. It’s kind of a funny wrap up. It was one of the most interesting years that I’ve been part of only because there was probably a little more unknown with this team when the year started. Part way through there was still some unknowns. This yearâ��™s team if it didn’t teach us all a lesson in resiliency and power of togetherness, having a common goal and being obsessed with what they didn’t get last year. Learning from the players in the past. You put all off those things together and this team was probably a microcosm of all of that.

The 27 wins when I think of that and start thinking of those three, four or five definite wins if we just shot anything from the free throw line. It’s amazing that this team where they went and where they could have been. How did we get there? School record in assists, ranked in the top five in the nation. Our assist to turnovers which wasn’t as strong in other years was off the chart, I think it was ranked seventh. School record in blocked shots not necessarily one of our fortes. Second most threes, almost three hundred threes we made this year and shooting a pretty good percentage.

I think there were some individual things as classes. Our senior class with 112 wins ties our 2002 class for second most wins in school history. You look at what this class accomplished, four NCAA Sweet Sixteens, two Elite Eights, a Final Four. That’s storybook. That is big time things that we’ve been a little to accustom to here, but that is not the norm.

Dawson himself, I will always want more from him. Second in career rebounds, sixth in career steals, fifth in career starts, scores 1300 points in the top 25 of the history of this school. Be the only player 6’6” or under since the late eighties that has lead the team in rebounds.

Trice has got some unbelievable stats too. 1100 career points. Almost 600 points this year that matches his previous three years total which speaks to injuries or he may have had some unbelievable career stats. Almost 200 career assists which is almost in the top ten history of our school. Three pointers he’s tied for fifth in a career and when you look at his career it was so rocky his first couple of years.

Denzel Valentine gets 102 three pointers. That is the third best single season since they started that.

The thing this team really did that isn’t stat related, they really bonded and realized that they need each other. I think it was midway or beginning of February where the best sell job I did to my staff, my players and myself. That was going back and looking at all of those games over and over at night and realizing how good or bad did you really play? How much did those damn free throws cost ya? I realized they cost us enough games that the 13-7 record could be 18-4. We’d be ranked and happy and everybody would be healthy. The way they got there is that they believed that and then they started playing better because they did believe a little bit. The layups we were missing we started making more of them. We stopped taking less bad shots and our turnovers started coming down enormously. The rotation, the change, getting Travis to the two helped some, getting Tum in there defensively helped some. Getting a scorer coming off the bench probably helped some. It probably seems like a million things that you would put together in a coaching book just on this season alone. That would all be true and right, but at the end of the day I was lucky to have great leadership in Trice and Valentine. I had a star player that had no big ego in Dawson. A team that bought into the defense, which I still don’t know how we became as good of a defensive team as we became. Maybe a team that bought into each other as good as any that I have had. Knowing that they needed each other to be successful because maybe they weren’t quit talented enough to do it on their own.

It was a frustrating year the first half to coach because of the missed free throws. It wasn’t that we shot that much better from the free throw line, but I think our confidence rose when we realized why we were losing. It wasn’t that we were shooting bad, we were shooting good. It wasn’t that our defense was bad, because our defense was good. It was just that bottom line, in the Twitter world that you weren’t any good because you were losing games. Getting over that hump was a big part of the year.