Michigan State Basketball Falls at home to Indiana: 3 Quick Take

On By Littum

1. MSU, as it plays right now, won’t win anything meaningful

East Lansing – OOF. Bob Knight is definitely hanging hard on a piece of this Big Ten winter record.

The bigger problem for Tom Izzo and Michigan State’s basketball program is the Spartans are not playing very well right now, except for an electric second half against Oregon on Saturday. This performance was nowhere to be found on Tuesday night against Indiana, who bullied MSU in the paint, threw a zone on the Spartans confused them and went out of the Breslin Center with their first win in six matches, 71-67.

In the meantime, MSU did not look like a team that has the chops to compete for a Big Ten championship, even when the Spartans put together a feisty last few minutes, with a free-throwing clinic.

This version of MSU does not win at Illinois on Saturday or against Purdue next Tuesday or on Michigan Friday after it or in Maryland the following Wednesday. Knight could have a share of this thing until once in March if these Spartans continue to emerge.

It is hard to imagine that this is the norm. Not all teams have big to get MSU in that kind of bad trouble. Not every night, the poot guard Jeremy will fear that Jr. be so ineffective, and the Spartans’ sliders will be the off-self-4-for-23 from 3 do not seem so foreign.

But for big chunks of the last four games – ever since Izzo was on the brink of Knight’s record – life has been a fight for the Spartans.

Forget the record, MSU (19-5 overall, 10-3 Big Ten) has figured out how to get started again. Of course, the schedule is picked up. But during his 9-0 Big Ten-start, MSU beat three teams that have beaten Hoosiers. Tuesday had nothing to do with the schedule. However, the rest of the month is another animal.

2. The great men of Indiana were a problem

I’m not saying that MSU should have tried to land Oumar Ballo in the transfer portal. There are plenty of reasons why the Indiana 7-Footer (using Arizona) would not have been the right fit for the MSUS team and program. But you can see the problems a guy of his size and presence causes when he is locked inside. He was a problem on Tuesday, pretty much because he got the big men in serious bad trouble. This is the first time that happened to this extent all season.

Hoosiers 6-9 Power Forward Malik Reneau took over from there and ended with 19 points on 8-for-19 shooting after walking 1-for-8 from the floor in the first half. He also had 12 rebounds. MSU had no answer for him on the driving down the stretch.

However, Ballo was really good and put the tone-14 points on 6-for-8 shooting, 10 rebounds, three on the offensive end and a team-best plus-13 plus minus in 26 minutes before even getting out.

This was Matchup’s MSU struggling to deal with in recent years, including last season in Bloomington. MSU, believe it or not, was better than a year ago. Foul problems were more paralyzing than matchup. Szymon Zapala, Jaxon Kohler and Carson Cooper Ware were all limited by errors, with Cooper stepped out in 16 minutes and Kohler and Zapala ended with four in 18 and 15 respectively.

Cooper, who had seven points and five rebounds, ended with a team-best plus-minus of plus-seven, while Kohler (seven rebounds, six of them in the first half) and Frankie fiddes (both plus-1) were the only other Rotation players with positive plus minuses for MSU. In other words, when Cooper and Kohler were in the game, things were OK-ish. They were not the problem as much as their bad trouble, and MSU’s bad shooting and Point Guard game.

3. Change of setup only highlights MSU’s unpredictability

Part of the identity of this MSU team is its unpredictability. It sometimes works for the Spartans. Sometimes not. One game is not often transferred to the next with individual performances.

MSU put beginner Jase Richardson in the starting lineup on Tuesday after Richardson’s dazzling effort against Oregon on Saturday. Three Holloman, which have started since the North Carolina game in Maui (which started MSU’s 13-match winning row), came from the bench. If a change was to be made, this was it.

Richardson is too much a part of MSU’s ceiling not to get the most out of him, although the start is not important to do so. Holloman is a team guy who can handle such a movement. Still, he was MSU’s best guard for large parts of Tuesday’s game – definitely MSU’s most effective Point Guard against Indiana’s zone, with nine points and seven assists and a big float and some important free kicks late.

Richardson was also good at times good-by to finish with 13 points (though to do only 1 out of 6 3-point attempts)-inclusive a short stretch in the second half, where it looked like he could take things offensively. It never happened. And his late revenue, as MSU was in the way of a possession, was expensive. He is a beginner. It’s a lot to ask him to be the guy. But offensively, he is MSU’s best guy. He just wasn’t nowhere to be as good as he’s been on his best Saturday. He wasn’t the question. But he wasn’t the answer.

Contact Graham Couch at [email protected]. Follow him on x @graham_couch and bluesky @grahamcouch.