1. MSU picks up ‘signature win’ over Iowa with another menacing fourth quarter
EAST LANSING – Michigan State’s menacing fourth quarters are no joke. Even a seasoned Iowa team, with players who’ve played in far bigger games than this, couldn’t help but wither in the final period against the Spartans on Sunday.
MSU’s women’s basketball team held on for a 68-66 win — surviving some shaky moments at the free-throw line and winning with defense.
It’s something else to watch — an opponent somewhat in control, handling the press, getting good looks and knocking them down, suddenly lose all of that, as MSU’s defensive pressure finds a new gear.
MSU trailed 58-49 just over a minute into the fourth quarter. And with 5:07 remaining, led 63-58. Inside that 14-0 run over those 3 1/2 minutes, the Spartans came up with five straight stops, forcing two turnovers and blocking a shot, while allowing only one offensive rebound, which came off that blocked shot. On the other end, MSU made six of seven shots, spurred by Nyla Hampton’s eight points.
“The press picked up a little bit and I think it really bothered him at that point, and it was really good for us,” Julia Ayrault said.
And from there, it didn’t get better from Iowa on the offensive end — other than four free throws — until a layup by Taylor Stremlow with 1:14 remaining cut MSU’s lead to 67-64.
MSU wasn’t as smooth in the final minutes offensively, but Iowa offensively was shaken. You could see it, for example, when with the Spartans leading 65-60, MSU’s Jaddan Simmons’ forced a wild and panicked pass from Iowa’s Lucy Olsen that went into the crowd. MSU turned the turnover into another Hampton layup and a seven-point lead.
All of this in a game MSU was struggling to stay afloat in during the third quarter as Iowa made 3-pointer after 3-pointer, leading 52-43 with about two minutes left in the quarter.
“It’s part of the way we play. There’s just this persistence,” MSU coach Robyn Fralick said after her team won its Big Ten opener and improved to 10-0. “I remember coming into one of our timeouts in the fourth quarter, it’s like, this is what we do. This is why we do what we do. We don’t slow down now. We crank up our pressure. We stay with it and our team, there’s a belief in it, we’ve consistently seen in fourth quarters, we’ve been able to have some breakthroughs.
“But you’ve got to be persistent with it, and you can’t think it’s an immediate (thing). So often kids think, ‘Well, if it doesn’t work right away, it doesn’t work.’ No, it works. But it you have to do it over and over and over and over again, and our team did a great job staying with it.”
MSU entered the game outscoring its opponents 26.9 to 12.2 in the fourth quarter and won Sunday’s fourth quarter 19-14, with that 14-0 stretch.
Part of what makes this team is the number of players who make pivotal contributions — Hampton’s 13-point fourth quarter (more on that below), Simmons and Ines Sotelo defensively on the press, Theryn Hallock’s 3 to get the run going, Emma Shumate with two 3s and several notable defensive stands and rebounds, which led to a team-best plus-minus of plus-nine, and so on and so forth, including leading scorers Ayrault (19 points) and Grace VanSlooten (14). MSU doesn’t have a take-over-the-game player. But the Spartans can hit you with waves of capable players.
RELATED: Nyla Hampton sparks strong finish for MSU women’s basketball in win over Iowa
This was a big win for this program — the Big Ten opener, a ranked opponent, a program that’s been to two straight national championship games, one that had hundreds of traveling fans Sunday at the Breslin Center, and a game in front of a sizable crowd, some of them curious about this MSU team and the experience they create.
You could see what it meant in the reaction of MSU’s players and in Fralick, pumping her first to the fans as the team celebrated afterward.
“It’s a signature win,” Fralick said. “ … I thought last year when we played top teams, we played them really tight, but we had that next step to finish the game and to win the game. And I thought tonight, our team, our program, took another step in finishing the game.”
2. Hampton stole the show and won the game
MSU point guard Nyla Hampton had a relative quiet first three quarters. Then boom. She had the game on a string.
It started when she drove knocked over her defender, then buried a short jumper. Then it was driving layup and another one, this one with a great hesitation move. Then she went and grabbed an arrant shot on the offensive end and and drove the lane and buried a floater. Suddenly MSU was ahead 60-58. She attacked and scored twice more, scoring all 13 points in the final quarter.
A player known for her defense — twice the Mid-American Conference defensive player of the year at Bowling Green — took over on the offensive end. Not by choice, she said. By opportunity and understanding.
“As the game goes on, we have a bunch of shooters on the perimeter, we have Julia and Grace on the inside, who you can’t really come off of,” Hampton explained. “So as the game goes on, those gaps just open up and open up a little bit more. So I just kind of saw the opportunity and took it.”
“She changed the game,” Fralick said.
3. You can see where size will be a challenge for this MSU team
MSU is skilled and plucky in the paint. And maybe big enough. We’ll see. Iowa’s size and post players — namely Hannah Stuelke, but also 6-foot-4 Addison O’Grady and 6-4 Ava Heiden — gave the Spartans some trouble Sunday.
MSU knew going in that this would be an area they’d have to overcome — and will in several other Big Ten matchups. The question is, can the Spartans do what they do well enough to counter it? And can their own post players hang in well enough defensively and on the glass to make it less of an issue? They did Sunday, taking over with their defense in the fourth quarter, even forcing Iowa to go small (with Stuelke as the Hawkeyes’ center), to help deal with he Spartans’ pressure.
“It took us a while,” Fralick said.
Statistically against the Hawkeyes, MSU did fine on the interior — it was Iowa’s third-quarter shooting that created the separation. But a lot of Iowa’s shots come from offense that goes inside and then comes back out and is, in part, created by the attention on their post players.
MSU switched to fronting the Hawkeyes’ posts with a guard in the third quarter, which left shooters open.
“You’re kind of gambling,” Hampton said.
MSU also wound up in foul trouble trying to contend with Iowa’s bigs. Jocelyn Tate had four fouls midway through the third quarter, Grace VanSlooten had two midway through the second and Ines Sotelo had three fouls in the first half and picked up her fourth at the beginning of the fourth (and then stole an inbounds pass), before fouling out four minutes later— all of which impacted MSU’s lineups and how the Spartans want to play.
Stuelke is a known commodity in the college game and a difficult matchup — she had 18 points on 4-for-10 shooting (10-of-14 free throws) and eight rebounds Sunday, despite battling a little of her own early foul trouble. But O’Grady and Heiden are both skilled around the rim and sturdy.
Yet what looked like it might be a problem for MSU early, wasn’t. The Spartans were out-rebounded 44-35, but only 14-12 on the offensive glass and none of that’s as concerning when you consider, at one point, it was 7-1 Iowa on the boards and 3-0 on the offensive end.
More over, MSU won by doing what it does best — and making Iowa’s size largely irrelevant down the stretch.
RELATED: Couch: There are reasons to believe in MSU’s women’s basketball team – beyond its blistering start
Contact at Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch and on BlueSky at GrahamCouch.
