For the most part, yesterday’s basketball game between Michigan State and Duke was everything it had promised to be – two heavyweight teams exchanging blows. In the end, our Spartans fell a little short
and the Blue Devils continued to be Tom Izzo’s Achilles’ heel. And as I said to friends I spoke to afterwards, I can’t say that Duke is a better team than MSU. This felt like a game where MSU did themselves in.
But before I get into what transpired at the Breslin, I have to vent about something that happened on my way to the game. In the game thread, I mentioned an accident at the I-96/I-496 junction. I am not sure if there actually was an accident, as my navigation said, or if there were some other factors causing the delay. I ended up hopping off at the Dunckel Road exit and came up Harrison. But then there was something else that caused me to nearly miss the beginning of the game (I reached my desk in the press area with the pregame clock at 35 seconds). Media parking is in Ramp 7 across Harrison. Entering the ramp at about 11:35, there were plenty of other late people inching their way up the ramp. Once I reached the second level, I could see up to the next level that all the cars were pulling past their spot in order to back in. This made everything take longer than it could have. By the time I reached the top level, and it was 11:50, here is what happened. The car right in front of me was next up to park. Of course, like everyone else, he was going to back into a spot. On the left row of parked cars, there was an open spot then a parked car and then a whole bunch of open spots. Guy in front of me was going to try backing into that one open spot. Of course, he did not line it up correctly, so he had to pull forward. Immediately, all the cars right behind me start honking -as they should have. So the guy in front of me pulls forward and tries again, but this time he messed up even more and was now in the middle of the aisle end to end with two parked cars on both sides of the aisle. Honking gets louder. He starts inching forward and backward to get himself out of this pickle. This is what it looked like.
Thankfully, he had gotten just far enough up the aisle that I was able to simply pull forward into the spot he was trying to get into. I grabbed my computer and camera bags and got out of my car as quickly as possible. The chorus of honking cars would have been funny if I was not so furious. This car was still stuck in the aisle and causing a backup of dozens of cars with people trying to get to the game. So I went up to this car and started shouting at him (I admittedly have massive road rage – I’m working on it with my therapist) to pull forward and go park nose first. My shouting was filled with expletives and I am sure my face turned red. I’ll tell you this. When I turned away after a good 20-30 seconds of shouting (in which the driver and his passenger just stared at me speechless) and began heading for the stairs, every single car still waiting to park rolled their window down to say thank you to me. I never looked back so I don’t know how long it took him to get his car unstuck and into a spot.
So here is the lesson I want to share with you. When you are in a parking garage and in a big line of cars trying to park, please just pull into the first available spot nose first so everyone can park as quickly as possible. Sure, it will be harder to get out of your spot afterwards, but getting to the event on time is infinitely more important than getting home ten minutes sooner. Also, if you don’t know how to back into a parking spot, regardless of if there are cars behind you or not, please cut up your driver’s license and do not subject other people to your failures in life.
Okay, if you are still here, let’s talk about this game. I am going to start with the press conference afterwards and move backwards. If you have not watched it yet, here is the full video.
If you go to the 11:00 mark, you will hear a question from Graham Couch about what the take-away emotion from the game was. Tom’s response: “Pissed off.” I have been to a few pressers now; I’ve seen Izzo happy after wins and I’ve seen him disappointed or sad after losses. I won’t say he has never been pissed off before, but it certainly felt like he was taking this loss a little different. It was evident in how he was answering other questions from the media, not just Graham’s.
I am right there with Tom. I am still pissed off today, and not just about that incident in the parking garage. MSU made mistakes that were uncharacteristic. We had the skill and talent to win that game. We were not focused and the game plan at times was not its best. Never was this truer than in the beginning of the game. In my preview from Friday, I wrote about staying in single coverage against Cameron Boozer and not allowing Duke to get open looks from three. Well, Duke opened the game with a made triple. In just over six minutes of play, they attempted five from behind the arc, only one by Boozer, and connected on three of them. I will say those four non-Boozer shots were of the wide-open variety. That had MSU down 13-7, a six-point deficit that equaled the game’s final margin. At the under-8 break, 13 of Duke’s 18 shots had been from deep, as were five of their seven made baskets. The MSU defense adjusted as the game went on, as Duke only took 11 more triples after that. But it was an early hole that we had to dig out of, one that should have been avoided… and could have been avoided if the coaching staff had read my preview.
Outside of the opening stretch that saw us down an early six and our struggles to score in the final four minutes of the game, I think MSU was the better team. I really liked seeing the opening plays of each half be designed plays for Carson Cooper. After his struggles against Iowa, I felt it was crucial to have him be a factor in this one. I asked him about this post-game, but he said it was not scripted and just happened organically. Either way, having an involved and contributing Cooper certainly kept us close in this one. Also, I really like the confidence from Cooper to rock a t-shirt with his face on it.
As far as the other reasons we lost, many of you already discussed it in the thread and in Mike’s recap. Fears going 0-10 on FGs (along with Kur Teng’s 0-5) was certainly a part of it. I am particularly concerned that Fears is a combined 2-16 over the past two games. And then there were all the missed layups, a dozen by my count. Some of those misses were due to a good contest from a Duke defender. Some were just ill-advised, forced shots. And then some were just simply missed for no good reason. There were enough of those to be upset about, too.
I was trying to come to some conclusion for all of this, why MSU had their worst shooting performance of the season, you know, aside from playing a good Duke squad. The conclusion I came to is that there were a lot of nerves at play. Not just from hosting the infamous Spartan-stoppers, though. I think there has been a lot of noise around the Spartan athletic department this past week, and it may have gotten too loud. The new football coach. The “For Sparta” initiative. The $400 million donation. Coach Fitzpatrick made another appearance during this game to get on the mic and throw souvenirs into the Izzone. And there was another thing about the donation that was announced over the loudspeaker during a timeout. While I think everything going on right now with MSU is great, I think we need to stop using basketball games to draw attention to it. Let the team focus on the game rather than being a part of some even larger spectacle.
I don’t know. Maybe that was a stretch. But even when the team took some leads in this game, something felt off. Something was distracting the Spartans from being their typical well-disciplined team. They were making mistakes they don’t usually make, like the four rebounds Duke got on their own missed FTs, something that had not happened once this season. Something took them off their game, and I am not willing to admit it was the Blue Devils.
My last notes from this game are regarding Fears, but now in a positive light. We know Tom Izzo always wants his point guard to be an extension of himself, a coach on the floor. I think Fears has reached that point. There was one point in the game, and I am bummed I did not capture it on camera, but Fears was standing at midcourt waiting for a stoppage in order to check in and Izzo was standing near the bench. As play was going on, both of them were jumping up and down in unison and doing the same gestures with their hands. It was like one was a carbon copy of the other. Having someone with a grasp of Izzo’s designs to the extent that Fears has is something we have not had since Winston.
Oh, and speaking of Cassius, I think Fears is reaching the same level of admiration from the fans as #5 used to receive. Following the 2019 Final Four run and especially after the tragedy involving his brother, Zachary, the entire MSU community rallied behind Cassius. While Fears has not led MSU as far as Winston did yet, and while fortunately the gunshot incident from his freshman year did not end up any worse, there does seem to be an emotional connection between him and the audience. His intelligent playmaking seems to always turn the tide of the Breslin audience’s emotional trajectory and get us what we need. A couple examples for you. First, still early in the game, right after Duke got that 13-7 lead, Fears got an assist on a Trey Fort dunk. Immediately after, and before Duke even inbounded the ball, Fears was in the face of a Duke guard to talk some smack. As soon as they were separated (the ref called out to them to break it up), that Duke player got the ball and brought it up court only for Fears to eventually swipe the ball from him and lead a break back the other way, ending in a Coen Carr layup. That is what we, the team and Spartan Nation, needed at that moment. Another example came just before halftime. Duke had trimmed a five-point Spartan lead down to 1 and had just missed a shot with five seconds left that would have given them the lead. Momentum was going in the Blue Devils direction. Fears got the ball, rushed it up court, and drew contact to get to the line with a second left to get two points back. That changed the vibe going into the break. He has a sense of the moment, and he seems to give exactly what is needed when it is needed (other than making a field goal these past two games).
There is a lot to work on. Izzo knows it. His players know it, both because Tom said it to them after the game but also because there are some high basketball-IQs on this team. The game next Saturday at Penn State is going to be a chance to see if some of those things have already been worked on. I sort of feel bad for the players on MSU because they will have to deal with pissed-off Izzo for the next week before their next game. But after that, I sort of feel bad for the players on PSU because I am expecting a dominant performance from a team who knows they just lost a game they should not have lost.
