“There ain’t no overlook, especially not on my end, and there shouldn’t be with other players,” Walton said. “You know, they’re a pretty good team. They won (Sunday) so I know they’re going to come in here with a lot of confidence.”

The No. 9 Spartans (21-5 overall, 11-3 Big Ten) host the Hawkeyes (14-15, 4-10) at 8:30 p.m. tonight at Breslin Center.

Iowa, who lost seven of eight games before winning two of its last four, most recently picked up an overtime win against Michigan on Sunday.

The Hawkeyes have four players who score in double-digits, led by freshman guard Matt Gatens with 11.1 points per game.

Guards Jeff Peterson and Anthony Tucker are each averaging about 10 points a game, although Peterson has missed two straight games with a hamstring injury.

Iowa’s fourth leading scorer may be its most impressive. Sophomore guard Jake Kelly, who earned Big Ten Player of the Week honors last week, nearly had a triple-double (23 points, eight rebounds and nine assists) against U-M while playing all 45 minutes.

That performance, coupled with his 19 points against Purdue on Feb. 14, has put Kelly on MSU’s radar.

Walton said Kelly has been “playing out of his mind,” while MSU head coach Tom Izzo said, as far as he and his staff are concerned, Kelly is Iowa’s top player.

“We think Kelly’s their best player because he can do more things,” Izzo said. “Gatens is a tough kid — he’s going to be a great player for them — and (forward Cyrus Tate) is playing now … but I’d say Kelly and Gatens are the two guys that make them go.”

Izzo continued to say that Kelly is a player “who has got some stuff to his game,” and said he can do a variety of things — dribble-drive, create his own shot and shoot the three.

As for the Spartans, junior forward Raymar Morgan should continue to see his minutes increase, although Izzo isn’t sure to what extent ability-wise he can play. For much of the past month, Izzo has credited his team’s lack of consistency to Morgan’s absence, going so far as saying he didn’t know how important the junior was to the team before he was benched by illness.

The sooner Morgan comes back and restores order to an MSU lineup that has seen its ups and downs, the better. Until then, the MSU seniors and leading scorer, sophomore guard Kalin Lucas, will have to continue to carry the load and hold off potential upsets from teams such as Iowa.

“They’re a solid team,” senior center Goran Suton said. “They don’t turn it over a lot, they play solid defense, they do run a lot of ball screens, which gets tiring at some point, but (we) just have to be solid.”