West Lafayette, Ind. — Sometime Thursday morning, Michigan State coach Tom Izzo got breakfast with Gene Keady, the Purdue hall of famer who once took him under his wing as an up-and-coming coach. For an hour and a half, they caught up, opined on the state of the sport, and reminisced on all the “old wars” of Big Ten basketball.
Wars like Thursday night’s. Forty minutes of basketball that felt like 12 rounds. A sophisticated slobber-knocker, where toughness and execution win.
No. 13 Michigan State walked out of Mackey Arena with a 76-74 win over No. 8 Purdue, reassurance to a team too talented to lose its way as it had in Big Ten play and yet looking for its best self through most of February. And as the calendar flips to March by the time the Spartans roll back into Indiana to play the Hoosiers on Sunday, they feel Thursday’s win is encouraging for what comes in the postseason.
“We put ourselves in a position where now we have a measuring stick to say this is what you do when you prepare well,” Izzo said. “This is what you do when the walk-through in the hotel was good, film sessions are good, and you play with some passion, some toughness and some togetherness.”
From the surface, Thursday’s game between Purdue and Michigan State (23-5, 13-4 Big Ten) had little real stakes despite being a ranked battle. The Big Ten championship race is all but decided, save for who’s the odd man out when it comes to triple-byes in the conference tournament. Both teams’ March Madness resumes are rock solid, allowing for some fluctuations in seeds. But in symbolism, Thursday’s result is one of the most important showings of Michigan State’s season.
For Michigan State to go into Mackey Arena — an environment so intimidating that it leaves chests pounding and ears ringing long after the floodlights dimmed — and emerge with a win that 12 years’ worth of Spartans could never muster, that’s a statement. And what it says about Michigan State is that it’s capable of everything it envisions, something it had repeatedly stumbled to do.
“This was a great win and it kind of showed the world what we’re capable of,” sophomore shooting guard Kur Teng said. “And it showed us what we know we’re capable of. We just gonna continue to build and continue to get better.”
The foundation for such wins has been there all season. An All-Big Ten caliber point guard in Jeremy Fears Jr., blessed with that brash attitude that Izzo craves in his quarterbacks. An experienced frontcourt — Jaxon Kohler, Carson Cooper, Coen Carr — dragged through the fires of losses and the flames of postseason stakes to emerge as key upperclassmen. Especially down the stretch, a pair of immediate freshman contributors in Cam Ward and Jordan Scott fit the bill of prototypical Izzo young guns and play with guts beyond their age.
The blueprint is there. The results? Now those have been harder to come by.
For weeks, there’s been a disconnect between how Michigan State prepares and how it produces on the court. Intense practices, great film sessions. Then, a dud. Especially on the road, at Nebraska, or at Minnesota. Even though it was less than three weeks ago that the Spartans downed Illinois in overtime at home, a loss at Wisconsin immediately after that brought back some of the lingering questions. Even home wins had their woes, like Sunday’s too-close finish against Ohio State.
“They practice so hard every day that I really appreciate that,” Izzo said. “But it’s like studying for a test — and you study your butt off — and then you go to the test, and you don’t take it very well.
“I hope this jump starts us now.”
It’s evident that this Michigan State team is, much like last year’s, full of Izzo’s kind of guys. Hard workers with scrappy demeanors. Maybe not the most talented, but driven. And that shows up in the auxiliary gym of Breslin Center every day. The confounding thing — probably physically painful to their coach — is that all that work doesn’t always translate to the court.
But when it does?
When 6-foot-4 Teng stands up to Purdue’s 6-foot-11 center Oscar Cluff in the paint, aids the stop, then beats his own 6-foot-11 center to the rebound? When Ward throws down dunks and floaters and hauls in rebounds as a spark plug off the bench? When Carr — a guy whose contributions early in his career started and ended with his head above the rim — closes out a final shot from a Naismith finalist and wins?
You get wins like Thursday’s, and you see why Izzo gets so excited about this team.
“You can do a case study, because he’s been there so long,” Purdue coach Matt Painter said. “So you can go 30 years, and then look at it and say, OK when is he doing better? Sometimes, when you have just the best talent, you’re like, ‘Oh, these are our guys.’ Well, you’re winning a bunch, but are they your guys. These are his type of guys.”
Importantly, guys who are sticking together. That was an emphasis through the rough patch in February. It tested Michigan State’s resolve, another test amid all the truth serum of a big road game. That’s where this team needed answers.
“We knew this whole week, it was just sticking together, being together, being connected,” Fears said inside a swarming locker room, more jubilant than it has been in weeks. “We just had to figure out what we needed to do, kind of look in the mirror. … I think today we built and we bonded. Everybody had a big impact.”
“It was evident that we stuck to our game plan, and we stayed together the whole game,” added Cooper. “You know, there’s multiple times in that game where we’re down by a couple possessions, and we could have kind of got away from each other, or got on each other. But we stuck together.”
That’s the recipe for Michigan State going forward. It has been all year. This isn’t a team of first-round draft picks or portal pickups pieced together to form a juggernaut. Nor is it some scrubby underdog riding luck. It’s a team, in the true sense, whose ceiling rises when it can get eight guys to play on the same page like they did Thursday night. That’s the orchestration that’s been missing at times this season, something finally coming together.
“That’s what’s going to move us forward,” Izzo said. “We’re not as talented as some teams you’ve seen us have over the years, but we are — I said for two years I’ve been the luckiest guy in America. We’re together and connected, and together and connected does a lot.”
cearegood@detroitnews.com
@ConnorEaregood
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Win over Purdue a jolt as Spartans enter March: ‘I hope this jump starts us’
Reporting by Connor Earegood, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
