Micah Shrewsberry: Penn State 'flips' another close win

Penn State head coach Micah Shrewsberry found a familiar theme in his Nittany Lions’ Big Ten Tournament win on Thursday night.

Again in Indianapolis for the second round of the conference tournament, this time, Penn State topped No. 6-seed Ohio State, 71-68. The upset built on a first-round win over Minnesota, setting up a Friday night third-round date with Purdue.

Getting there required a huge second half given a relative dry spell before the break. But with 47 points scored after the half, Penn State managed to flip a double-digit deficit into a win.

With it, Penn State notched its ninth win against Big Ten competition this season and improved to 14-16 overall for the 2021-22 season.

What did Micah Shrewsberry have to say about Penn State’s win after the game?

Check out his post-game press conference, provided courtesy the Big Ten’s zoom feed, and transcript highlights courtesy of ASAP Sports:

Penn State coach Micah Shrewsberry postgame

On what changed offensively at the half:

“We kind of get a better feel as the game goes on. There were a couple adjustments that we talked about, but not much. I talked more about our defense out there, not our offense. These guys are the ones playing, so they have the freedom to talk about what they see, how we can attack better. 

“I didn’t think our physicality was very good offensively in the first half. I talked about E.J. Liddell and Joey Brunk wanted the ball in the post. They caught it with one or two feet in the paint. First play of the game, Pickett drives the post and gets pushed all the way out to the 3-point line. There’s the difference right there. In the second half, now he’s backing guys down. He’s two feet in the paint, they have to decide if they want to help or not. 

“But our physicality changed and then our offense changes. I talked about this guy yesterday, the guy I used to work for, Brad. He always says the toughest teams set the rules and I felt like we were the tougher team in the second half.

On Myles Dread’s performance for Penn State:

“I think just taking on the challenge of guarding E.J. Liddell. Pickett picked up a couple fouls, Seth picked up three fouls. They played a long time with that, but we kind of switched up our matchups in terms of what we wanted to do. Like he’s a hard cover, man. He can score in the post, he can step out and drive, he can make threes. So you have to have some guys with some versatility who can guard him. 

“I thought Myles just did a pretty good job of just being physical, trying to push his catches out further, trying to deny as much as possible and then make it as tough as possible. He still scored a boatload of points. We fouled him way too much, got him to the free-throw line where he was getting in ones or got him into the bonus, like the 10-minute mark. We need to do a better job than that. That’s one of our keys going in, not sending him to the free-throw line as much. I thought his will defensively really kind of spurred us on offensively. 

“One of the things we knew is E.J. helps a lot. He’s great, he’s a great shot blocker, but sometimes he veers too far off his man and Myles got a big three because he was in the paint like that. Then the next time they helped, he made an extra pass to Seth for a three. And those were huge plays for us to keep our offense going.”

On John Harrar’s crucial late-game rebound over four Ohio State defenders:

“He makes plays like that every single game for us. That’s who he is. Unbelievable for a guy to play like how he plays, get ready to play all day today and then come out and play, you know, 31 minutes, 31 minutes as hard as he plays on both ends. They’re going at him in the post with Joey Brunk and he’s fighting down there, then he’s sprinting to the other end of the court, now he’s sprinting back up and setting ball screens and rolling to the rim as hard as possible, going for the offensive rebound and then sprinting back on defense. And then late in the game they go small and now he’s got to guard E.J. Liddell and just his communication, he denied him one time and tried to push him further out on the court. 

“You can’t talk — you can’t say enough things about that kid. There’s a lot of things that you can say, how great of a player he is, how great of a person he is, but unbelievable will and fight. He’s one of the toughest dudes I’ve ever been around.”

On Penn State’s second-half offensive efficiency:

“We’ve had games where we’ve really struggled, but these guys just kind of found different ways to get to their strengths and we were just trying to play to our strengths. We felt like Pickett had an advantage posting guys, so we tried to go to that. We thought trying to attack and pick and rolls a little bit, trying to get them into switches and now bringing another guy in, making him decide who do they want to switch it, do they not want to switch it, right? We do a lot of different things. 

“That’s one thing that’s probably — like if you watch us play, there was a couple things we do each game, but you’re probably looking at it like, and they do one thing like one time, then they’ll do something one time, then they’ll do something else one time. It’s hard to prepare for everything when there’s so much randomness to how we play. So our guys just found, like Sam was saying, the advantage that they liked, that they wanted and we just tried to attack in that way.”