The Spartans got a glimpse of life without Paul Davis. They didn't like what they saw.
The senior center was hit by an errant elbow in practice Friday and had to get 10 stitches on the top of his head. It wasn't until just before tipoff of Saturday's game against Penn State that team doctors ruled him unable to play.
"I don't think it's a concussion, but I do think it was a pretty good blow and he lost some blood," head coach Tom Izzo said.
Davis said he tried to enter the game after halftime, but doctors kept him out.
"I told Coach, 'If you need to, just throw me in there,'" Davis said. "Then the doctors took me in the back and I just had to run up and down to see if I could do it, and it just wasn't happening. Just kept getting dizzy."
With a 6-foot-11 hole in their lineup, the Spartans struggled mightily to get the ball inside.
Junior forward Delco Rowley, redshirt freshman centers Idong Ibok and Goran Suton and redshirt freshman forward Marquise Gray rotated in place of Davis, but combined for just four points and nine rebounds in 50 minutes.
Davis is averaging 18.1 points and 9.9 rebounds a game — by himself.
"He's one of the best big men in the country, in my opinion," senior guard Maurice Ager said. "Just having him in there is going to cause so much problems for the other team. He ain't really got to do much — just his presence. A lot of teams kind of fear him."
Davis said he will "without a doubt" be able to play in the Spartans' next game at Northwestern on Saturday.
Forced out
Davis' absence — combined with Penn State's rigid 2-3 zone defense — kept the Spartans floating around the perimeter for most of the afternoon.
Of the Spartans' 55 shot attempts, 30 came from behind the arc — the team's most 3-point attempts in a game since the triple-overtime loss to Gonzaga on Nov. 22. After shooting 3-of-16 in the first half, MSU finished 11-of-30 from the perimeter.
"I didn't like that we shot that many there early," Izzo said. "You never want to shoot that many threes."
It was a bad day, then, for Ager to have his worst shooting performance of the season. A 37 percent 3-point shooter, Ager missed 11 of his 13 long-range attempts for the game, including three in about a 45-second span late in the first half.
Perhaps most baffling, Izzo said, was that they were some of Ager's most wide open shots of the season.
"Early in his career, they said there was never a shot he didn't like," Izzo said. "He's changed. He's done such a much better job of shot selection. I'm going to have to get him to shoot bad shots again because I really thought he had some great looks and he just couldn't — poor kid couldn't buy one."
Ager finished 3-of-19 from the field, but he said after the game that Izzo encouraged him to take those shots again if he gets the chance.
"As a scorer, you do got to have a short memory sometimes," Ager said. "It's still a 40-minute game. You can't stop shooting just because you miss a few."
