What Micah Shrewsberry Said After Penn State's 67-65 Win Over Northwestern

No. 10 seed Penn State defeated No. 4 seed Northwestern 67-65 in overtime in the Big Ten Tournament quarterfinals on Friday at the United Center. Here's what Penn State coach Micah Shrewsberry said after the game.

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CHICAGO, Ill. – No. 10 seed Penn State defeated No. 4 seed Northwestern 67-65 in overtime in the Big Ten Tournament quarterfinals on Friday at the United Center.

With this win, Penn State advances to the Big Ten Tournament semifinals on Saturday, where they'll play the winner of No. 3 seed Indiana and No. 6 seed Maryland. 

Here's what Penn State coach Micah Shrewsberry said after the game.

Shrewsberry's opening statement: Again, like my hat's off to Northwestern. They've had an unbelievable season. It's not over for them. They're going to play next week, and they're going to cause people problems. Those two guards are really good. And their defense is fantastic. We've struggled with that. We got it going a little bit better in the second half and hit a couple shots in the overtime, but they really bottled us up for a long time. I'm proud of our guys. Like this is -- I think tonight was the definition of probably gritty, not pretty. We're showing that we can win in a couple different ways. We can go bombs away from three. We can be a great offensive team. But you can't have that night every night, and here recently, our defense has been really good. If we're not making shots, we can guard people and grind out some tough wins.

Question: Micah, just wanted to ask, I vividly remember sitting at Indianapolis last year and listening to your post-game press conference after the Purdue game, and you did not want to leave that podium. It was like I think you talked for almost 18, 20 minutes. It showed to me how much the games mean to you. I just want to know how you're feeling year two and you're in this position about to play in the Big Ten Tournament semifinals after how close you were last year against a really good Purdue team.

Shrewsberry: The press conference is so long because I'm long-winded too. Like I can't stop smiling, sitting here. Like I'm enjoying every moment with this group. It's so fun. So fun to be with them. They prepare the right way. We weren't at our best, and you could tell. You could tell early, like in warmups. Like our coaches are like, I don't know if we have it tonight. Last night was really emotional in how we won and quick turnaround. But they dug deep, and they found it. I'm just having a blast. I'm having a blast. Pinching myself. Man, we get a chance to play tomorrow. We're in the semifinals of the Big Ten Tournament, like a tournament I've been watching as a little kid, and now I get a chance to coach it.

Q: Can you just talk a little bit about Kanye Clary, his poise as a freshman and how he's kind of added a new wrinkle to your offense as of late?

Shrewsberry: I tried to get him in early. We needed a little bit of a spark. I didn't think we had it early. Trying to get him in early. He's such a change-of-pace guard, especially to Pickett. It's like the tortoise and the hare out there. He's so fast. He can get to the rim. Sometimes he doesn't always make the right play, but his heart is in the right place. So he's growing and getting better. We need him. He was big time for us. Ten big points for us, attacking the rim, getting baskets when we needed it. I think that steadied us and gave us confidence to continue to play. It gave me confidence to keep him in in tough situations down the stretch.

Q: Coach, you had 15 turnovers in today's game. It's a season high for you guys, and they scored 23 off of that. How many of those were just your simple errors and how much of that was them being really solid defensively?

Shrewsberry: It's an area we have to clean up. We haven't been great here in the last probably four games or so. We've really turned the ball over a lot the first half. Then we've been better in the second half. This time it continued. But they're good defensively. They cause you problems. They're hard heads, drags you all the way out to half-court, and then you're trying to make passes through long arms with guys ready to rotate. They fly around. They come over and trap the box. They take charges. They're a well-drilled defensive team. So they probably cause a lot of those.

Q: I don't know how many times I've written "must win" since the end of the at-Maryland game, but this must have been like pushing a boulder uphill forever. Now what's it feel like to be able to exhale because you really can now?

Shrewsberry: But we don't want to. Like we're having fun, like I said. Like it's fun to go out there every single day with these guys. It's fun to prepare with them. It's fun to like just being there eating dinner together at night. We don't want this thing to end. We never want this thing to end. We want to play as long as possible. It was. It was hard. It was challenging. But none of those guys ever lost faith. They believed. They believed in each other, and they believed in what we could do as a team. Maybe it took a little bit longer than we wanted to, but we always said we want to play our best basketball in March, and I think we're doing that right now.

Q: Micah, do you feel like you guys are playing more freely, maybe with some of the confidence that you've locked yourself into the NCAA Tournament at this point?

Shrewsberry: I don't know. I think we're playing good basketball. I think that's what spurned us a little bit more. They're seeing what, if we play the right way, they're seeing the rewards of it. Like when you do that, like when you have that feeling, you want to keep that going. So like I said, I didn't think we had it from an energy standpoint. We turned the ball over a little bit too much, but I thought we were guarding, and I thought we competed, and we played the right way and made timely plays when we needed to. Now we get a chance to play again tomorrow.

Q: Micah, going back to Seth and how he was shooting it tonight and that level of confidence, what's it like to coach someone like him where I think that he feels like he can make any shot and he can make a lot of them too? 

Shrewsberry: He does feel like he can make any shot, right? Like sometimes, like yeah. I thought we were going to try to get the ball to Pickett there. He had Buie there, but Seth works on his game more than anybody. One of our GAs, Taaj Ridley and Josh Townsend, they're in the gym with those guys nonstop. Taaj always posts it on Instagram, calls it "daily vitamins." We've got a lot of guys getting their daily vitamins in. Seth has probably shot that shot millions of times. He was feeling it. He was confident. When he looked and kind of like backed up, I was like -- you know, I felt good about it either way because he's made tough shots like that. If he didn't make it, we were going to get a stop and come down and score again. That's how good I felt about how we were guarding, what we were doing, and I knew somebody would come down the stretch and make a tough one.

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