WATCH: Michigan State F Coen Carr Speaks After Loss to USC
For the first time since November, No. 7 Michigan State was bested by an opponent, as the Spartans ell, 70-64, to USC on Saturday.
One of the major factors in Michigan State's loss was its poor free-throw shooting -- the Spartans missed eight of their 19 attempts from the charity stripe. Surprisingly, one of their best free-throw shooters, sophomore forward Coen Carr, went just 1-4 from the line.
He did manage to finish with 9 points, going 4-of-6 from the field, but in a game that was determined by two possessions, he and the Spartans needed better success from the free-throw line.
Carr addressed the media after the loss. You can watch some of his media availability below:
Below is a transcript from Michigan State coach Tom Izzo's opening statement from his postgame press conference:
Izzo: "I had an assistant that said, ‘What starts bad, ends bad.’ And the start was atrocious. Wanted to go inside right off the bat. Turned the ball over twice. We took a couple of bad shots, I think it was 9-3, and I think we only had one shot. And then, we got down 21-27, and give our guys credit, they bounced back, but USC played better than us. I thought the biggest things that happened in the game -- we got punched in the mouth. That doesn't happen to us very often, and I don't know if we responded very well. Then, before half we did a little better job. But when you don't take care of the boards like we did, even though we outrebounded them by 1 -- that's kind of a facade, they had a couple of times when they had three or four rebounds in a row and scored both times, one on the 3 and one on the 3-point play. And then, uncharacteristically, we shot poorly from the free-throw line, which we’re an 83% free-throw shooting team. And what did we end up shooting? 57% or something. Had a couple of those goofy turnovers, and that's usually the difference in the game. But give credit to USC, they played well. And I’ve been waiting to see how we would respond under some adversity, and today, we didn’t respond very well, so we’ll have to fix that quickly since we have another game coming up.”
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