Cassius Winston, a.k.a. ‘Cash Money,’ leads Michigan State into Final Four

Michigan State’s Cassius Winston has everything you’d want in a point guard: leadership, experience, coolness under pressure, plus the ability to find open teammates and hit key shots.

And he likes cartoons.

“He watches cartoons all the time,” teammate Nick Ward said. “I live with him. I hear all the little gunshots, all the little Looney Tunes stuff. But for sure, it fits his personality.”

That personality also is represented by the backpack he carries. A gift from his mother, a Delta Airlines employee who recently returned from a trip to China, the backpack has the word “MONEY” across the top in green and blue with a heart filling in the letter “O.” Below that is a green bear with sunglasses and a dollar sign on its front.

It goes with his nickname, “Cash Money”: Cash being a derivative of his first name, and Money to signify how he delivers for the Spartans, the team that he leads into this weekend’s Final Four in Minneapolis.

Winston has delivered plenty this season. He is third in the nation in assists at 7.6 per game, and his 18.9-point average leads his team. He shoots 40.4 percent from three-point range. With 20 points and 10 assists (and one turnover) in Sunday’s 68-67 victory over Duke, he posted his 20th 20-point game and seventh double-double of the season.

“With Winston, you have a player that can make the right play at the right time, and he has tremendous poise,” Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said after the game. “I was impressed with how well he was able to not just handle the pressure, but still run his team. He has as good a performance as any player has had against us.”

The 6-foot-1 Winston, a junior from Detroit, performs with his emotions under control, even in the most intense moments, which is the opposite of his coach. Tom Izzo shows his passion for everyone to see and used to wonder why Winston didn’t show more, though he now says, “It’s taken me a while to learn his style.”

“You wonder how passionate he is sometimes, because he always stayed so even-keeled,” Izzo said. “I know inside there’s a burning desire, but sometimes the other players don’t. So I said at practice, ‘Remember, you’ve got to bring it even if it’s not as much physically. You’ve got to bring it emotionally and communicate.’

“And I think that’s where he’s really, really grown. He’s a special kid. He’s still the guy that you’d line up and I‘m not sure you’d pick him out to be one of the best basketball players in the country. But when you watch the things he does and the way he handles himself and the IQ that he has, which is off the charts, he’s found a way to be a hell of a player.”

However he leads, it’s working.

“I’ve been through a lot of mistakes," he said last weekend, "been through a lot of situations, just keep learning, getting better to the point where I feel like there’s not much that you can throw at me that I haven’t seen, not a lot of situations I haven’t been in. I’m going to figure out a way to get out of it.

“One of my jobs is to keep us composed, to keep us going, to keep us afloat, all type of things, so we’re just doing our job for our team.”

He eventually reached this level with the help of his father, Reg Winston, a former high school football coach, who started training him after he struggled with basketball in the third grade. As Cassius grew older, the regimen included pickup games against grown men, or in rougher neighborhoods in his hometown.

His career evolved. As a senior, he led University of Detroit Jesuit High School to a 28-0 record and a state championship, and won Michigan’s Mr. Basketball award. A fine student, Winston had offers from schools such as Stanford and Harvard, but chose Michigan State, and he has improved each season under Izzo.

“He’s definitely just a huge part of the person and the player I am today,” Winston said of Izzo. “He’s just constantly pushing you, constantly wanting you to get better, constantly believing in you more than maybe you believe in yourself. And that’s just huge. A lot of things thrown at you, a lot of things you learn on the fly, he’s with you every step of the way.”

As for his first name, Winston said he doesn’t know whether it’s a connection to the former name of boxing champion Muhammad Ali. He said his father wanted to name him Hannibal, “but my mom was not having it.” However, the day he was born, “nobody else thought of a name,” he said.

“They started spitting out random names for maybe two or three hours and finally someone said ‘Cassius,’ and that was the one that stuck,” he said.

He’s OK with the name. He admires Ali because “he’s the greatest of all time.”

For this weekend, however, he will settle for himself, and his team, being great for this one season and cutting down the nets Monday night.