Michigan State's Tom Izzo on the importance of a player-led team

Having led the team for three decades now, Michigan State men’s basketball coach Tom Izzo knows that even his role as head coach only goes so far when it comes to leading a team.

At the end of the day, it’s the players who are on the field together, and it’s up to them when the going gets tough or the game is on the line.

The Spartans have lacked a leadership presence in recent years, a major reason the program has fallen away from the level Michigan State basketball should reach year after year.

This offseason, Izzo attempted to reestablish a player-led culture in his locker room.

“I always believed that a player-coached team was better than a coach-coached team,” Izzo said at Big Ten Basketball Media Days on Thursday. “That’s always the case. Why? Because the players are with them when they eat, they’re together in the locker room, if they go to the movies, if they go to a party. It doesn’t matter what they do. The players are with the players. “So the players have to be able to control the players. The coaches receive them during training, they receive them during the meeting. But all that really matters is, even though people think we know everything, we don’t know everything. So a player-coached team means they can know what’s going on.

“No. 2, players pushing players is viewed differently than a coach pushing a player, especially nowadays. It’s almost like you start reading articles where no one thinks they can push a player. I feel like I can, because I don’t care — if a child wants to leave, they leave. But you still have to treat a child well. But what these kids are trying to do — and this is. not the case of any of them trying to win a championship and go to the NBA And 1% make it. And probably less than that, win a championship. difficult, if you think it’s going to be easy and it’s going to be no roadkill, you’re crazy because there’s going to be some.

This year, Izzo has several leaders. Not only because they are experienced, but also because they have faced difficulties.

“What I like about Jaden (Akins), Book (Xavier Booker) and Tre (Holloman) – who are here (at the Big Ten Basketball Media Days) – and Jaxon Kohler, these are guys that have been around for a little while but I might have failed a little bit,” Izzo said. “And instead of running away like half of America is doing right now, they stuck to what they had to do. I tell my players all the time, ‘The hardest thing to do for a human being is to self-evaluate.’ It’s easy for you to look at it and say, “You did this wrong, that wrong.” How often do we look in the mirror and say, “What did we do wrong?”

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