EAST LANSING — What a difference a year has made for Michigan State basketball.
The Spartans hit their finals week last December with a 4-5 record and coming off back-to-back losses to open Big Ten play. They went to Detroit after exams and promptly rebuilt their mojo with a blowout win over top-10 Baylor and won five straight.
This year, the biggest challenge for coach Tom Izzo is sustaining the momentum from three high-level performances. And doing so through a 10-day layoff between games as No. 19 MSU prepares to return to Little Caesars Arena on Tuesday to face the Oakland Golden Grizzlies.
“The advantage this team has had is we’ve been practicing like we’ve been playing,” Izzo said Friday, “and we’ve been playing like we’ve been practicing.”
The Spartans (8-2, 2-0 Big Ten) put together impressive consecutive conference victories on the road at Minnesota and at home against Nebraska, after returning from beating North Carolina 94-91 in overtime in their final game of the Maui Invitational. It was one of the most impressive three-game stretches in recent program history that catapulted Izzo’s team into the top 25 for the first time this season.
MSU averaged 91 points in the three wins and allowed 71.7 points, buoyed by Saturday’s 89-52 throttling of the Cornhuskers after opening Big Ten play with a 90-72 victory over the Gophers. It is the defensive side, though, where senior guard Jaden Akins said he feels the Spartans have made the most growth since the start of the season.
“I feel like we’ve been really connected on that end,” Akins said Friday after practice. “And our offense has definitely picked up a lot, just making shots, and that’s helped us a lot.”
The Spartans owned the rebounding in the three games (38.3-23.7) and held opponents to 42.9% shooting overall and 32.9% from 3-point range. They also finally started to hit from outside themselves, making 39.3% from behind the arc while hitting 57.3% overall and assisting on 61 of 91 (67%) of their made baskets.
Izzo said the success came from improved ball movement and an accelerated tempo in transition. MSU scored 65 points on the fastbreak and 109 points in the paint. And it got contributions from across the 10-deep rotation in each game, with Tre Holloman’s 19 points against UNC and Akins’ 18 against Nebraska the high-scoring marks of the 273 total points scored.
“I feel like we’ve been shooting the ball a lot better as a team,” freshman Jase Richardson said Friday. “The past couple games, we’ve been shooting really well. But I also just think just the communication on the court, we definitely have been talking to each other offensively and defensively. So that definitely is making the game a lot easier for us to make reads and then get stops on defense.”
Though Izzo saw plenty of steps forward from all three games in Maui and the two wins to open Big Ten play, he cautioned it is a small sample size.
“I tell my guys we just can’t have any excuses this year,” Izzo said. “We just got to play and practice to get better every day and not worry about if it’s a three-game stretch or a five-game stretch. I mean, I look at the season and there’s gonna be so many strange things with the (expanded 18-team Big Ten) and where we travel to and what goes on. We just gotta be ready to play every time we get a chance to play.”
Izzo also expressed some wariness about players “getting stale” with the 10-day break for finals week between the win over Nebraska and Tuesday’s trip to Detroit to face Oakland (3-5, 1-1 Horizon League). The Golden Grizzlies also will have a 10-day gap between games since their 66-50 conference loss at Youngstown State on Saturday. Coach Greg Kampe‘s team lost three nonconference road games, including at Illinois and No. 1 Kansas, as well as at home to Eastern Michigan, but beat Toledo and Wright State before Saturday’s loss.
MSU has never lost to Oakland in 22 meetings, dating back to the Golden Grizzlies moving to Division I in 1998. That includes three wins at LCA, most recently a 90-78 victory on Dec. 21, 2021.
The Spartans’ last trip to LCA was the 88-64 blowout of Baylor on Dec. 16, 2023. Izzo said he might bring officials into MSU’s practice Sunday before they head to Detroit, where he plans to take the team to the Pistons-Miami Heat game Monday ahead of Tuesday’s matchup.
“Detroit’s been pretty good to Tom Izzo and Michigan State,” Izzo said. “So I’m looking forward to going down there and spending some time with people that don’t get to see ya and maybe that appreciate you. That’ll be fun, too.”
Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him @chrissolari.
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