MINNEAPOLIS — Jeremy Fears Jr. has to decide how he wants to be thought of as a player. Because he’s losing the plot.
Fears has a chance to be one of the great Michigan State point guards, in a tier with players who are so beloved and respected for what they achieved and what they meant to MSU’s program that they’re remembered by a single name: Magic, Mateen, Cassius. There are others, but you catch my drift.
Over MSU’s last seven games — even including Wednesday’s largely dismal 76-73 loss at Minnesota — Fears is averaging 22.6 points, 9.1 assists, 1.9 steals and 2.1 turnovers, while making 89% of his free throws and 63% of his shots inside the 3-point arc. It’s a run of performance up there with the best stretches of basketball played by the greats before him. He’s No. 7 in Kenpom’s national player of the year standings.
And yet the conversation surrounding Fears right now has nothing to do with scoring 60 points over two games against Michigan and Rutgers last week, or being the first Big Ten player ever to tally 17 points and 17 assists in a single game, as he did a game earlier against Maryland.
It’s whether he’s a dirty player. And he’s making moves that feed that perception. He did so again Wednesday, on multiple occasions, some more egregious than the others — like kicking his leg back through the crotch of Minnesota’s Langston Reynolds early in the second half. The accumulation of instances is the issue.
Fears has always been a competitor who tries to get under his opponents’ skin and in their heads — the sort of guy you want on your team but hate to play against. That’s all fine. That stuff wins championships. This is beyond that. This stuff will cost him and his team. And he’s got to get a grip on it before it defines him, which would be a shame.
These last couple games he’s crossed a line that he’s always straddled.
He disagrees. Problem is, these games are on TV.
“I go out every game and I play hard. I don’t intentionally try to hurt anyone,” Fears said Wednesday night, sitting at his locker at Williams Arena. “I go out and play every game like it’s my last, because at one point it was my last. So I don’t take a game for granted. I don’t take a moment for granted. So I’m going to go out there and play as hard as I can every possession, every game. Like at one point, I had basketball taken away from me, so something I love to do, I couldn’t do it for a whole year. So most people wouldn’t understand that. And that’s on them, I guess. At the end of the day, it doesn’t change who I am or what I do. I’m just go out there and play 150(%) no matter what.”
You could see the emotion bubbling in Fears as he talked about having the game taken from him when he was shot in the leg just before Christmas during his freshman season. That might affect him as a competitor in ways he still needs to work through. His ferocity in battle is an attribute. His gamesmanship is a skill. But Wednesday he was reckless with it, all while understanding a microscope was on him after Michigan coach Dusty May called out his antics on Monday, saying his inappropriate acts weren’t hard to find on film in the Wolverines’ win over the Spartans last Friday.
“That’s usually what happens when (someone) makes a big deal about something,” Fears said of the extra eyes on him. “Going forward, I kind of expect it. … But at the same time, only thing you can do is just play ball. You can’t really control all that extra stuff.”
You can actually. You can control whether you stick your leg out to trip someone, or how physical you are around an opponent’s head and neck area when you’re not directly playing the ball, or how you react when an opponent is baiting you. Because that’s going to happen all the time now. It did some Wednesday. Teams are looking to get a reaction out of Fears, because they know they might.
You think Langston Reynolds thought he was going to steal the ball from Fears by going through him? Reynolds and Fears aren’t so different. Reynolds knew what he was doing. Fears was tired of it. The best version of Fears I’ve seen would have taken the collision from Reynolds and perhaps fallen down and then maniacally smiled at him. But MSU wasn’t in control of this game, just like the Spartans weren’t in control against Michigan. There haven’t been many games like that this season. Maybe that has something to do with it.
Tom Izzo hadn’t seen the Fears’ leg swing into Reynolds when he did his postgame press conference Wednesday night. He’s seen it by now. He did, however, see Fears’ hard swipe at Reynolds’ head as he contested Reynolds’ driving shot with 4:42 remaining. Izzo sat Fears for almost two minutes after that.
“It’s his fault, and I make no bones about it,” Izzo said. “I sat him for a while. I don’t even know if I’m going to start him the next game. But I stuck up for him, too, because I’ll just say what happened in the last game (with May’s remarks), that was handled was poorly, too. And so that starts everything. But Jeremy’s got to grow up a little bit.”
Izzo wanted May to call him and handle it that way, rather than first bringing it up at a press conference.
If Fears doesn’t grow out of this, as my colleague Detroit Free Press sportswriter Chris Solari suggested, he’ll move from being Aaron Craft to Grayson Allen — from being a respected annoyance to someone who’s only known for his dirty antics, despite being an All-American and national champion at Duke and nearly a 10-year NBA pro.
“I do worry about that,” Izzo said. “… If he plays that way, he deserves it. He ain’t going to play that way if I bench him in the next game.”
The next game is against 20-3 Illinois at home on Saturday night. MSU just lost Divine Ugochukwu to a foot injury Wednesday that Izzo said “doesn’t look good.” MSU needs the best of Fears for the most minutes he can be at his best. They need these last couple games by Fears to become footnotes in his career, just as the Spartans hope these last three games — the Rutgers’ overtime win included — are nothing more than a brief midseason swoon that’s often hit this program, including last season. They roared out of it then, as they have in some of their best seasons under Izzo.
Not all of that is up to Fears. But his reputation is.
Fears needs to be Draymond Green at MSU and not the Draymond Green who’s crossed the line to his own and his team’s detriment several times in the NBA.
The edge Fears plays with is essential to who he is. He’s got to control the nonsense.
“He’s taken a lot of heat and all that. He’s a great player,” Minnesota coach Niko Medved said. “Coach (Armon) Gates on our staff has coached his brother, knows the family. I know he’s a great kid. He’s a competitor, that’s who he is. Yeah, he gets a little carried away. And we saw that on film, and I thought (our players) did the right thing that way (antagonizing him). But he’s a guy you’d love to have on your team. But also, you can’t do what he did, and I guarantee he knows that.”
I think he does. We’ll find out.
RELATED: Couch: 3 quick takes on Michigan State basketball’s 76-73 loss at Minnesota
Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on X @Graham_Couch and BlueSky @GrahamCouch.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Couch: Michigan State’s Jeremy Fears Jr. is in danger of being defined by his antics
Reporting by Graham Couch, Lansing State Journal / Lansing State Journal
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