MSU freshman forward Draymond Green fights for a rebound with Indiana guard Devan Dumes. Green scored a career-high 15 points and had 12 rebounds in the 75-47 Spartans victory, Feb. 7 at Breslin Center. The two teams will meet again tonight. If MSU wins, it will clinch the outright Big Ten title.
After clinching at least a share of the Big Ten title on Sunday, the MSU men’s basketball team returned to its locker room with the same attitude as when it first entered.
Sure, there were plenty of hugs and smiles to go around. After all, the team had just won a share of its first Big Ten title since the 2000-01 season. But considering the significance of the feat, the celebration was relatively tame.
No loud music bounced off the walls, no confetti poured from the ceiling and no champagne (or “sparkling water”) was within sight.
Rather, there was a subdued excitement, a quiet swagger and a collective understanding that the mission is not complete.
After all, why settle for a piece of the pie when you can have the whole thing?
“We were happy. You have to celebrate this win,” said senior center Goran Suton after his team’s 74-66 win over Illinois. “It’s a big win on the road for us in a tough environment, so we celebrated that.
“We know we have a share of the championship, and it’s a beautiful thing. But I think with two games remaining, we want to get the whole thing for ourselves.”
MSU has two chances to capture its first outright Big Ten championship since 1999, but the team will be intent on closing the deal at 7 p.m. tonight against last-place Indiana at Assembly Hall in Bloomington, Ind.
Should the Spartans lose, their other chance to clinch the title would be Sunday in the season finale against No. 19 Purdue. But the Spartans don’t even want ?to consider that as an alternative and will treat this as a must-win game.
“We’re going to have to respond to that,” MSU head coach Tom Izzo said about the pressure of trying to clinch the title tonight. “I’m going to try to coach it like I do in the NCAA Tournament.”
Instead of driving back to East Lansing, MSU boarded the team bus and headed directly to Bloomington after Sunday’s game.
The travel arrangement should afford the Spartans more time to prepare for the Hoosiers, who despite their record (6-22 overall, 1-15 Big Ten), have fielded a much more competitive team in recent games.
On Saturday, Indiana led at Penn State by four points with 6:36 left before eventually falling 61-58. Two games before that, the Hoosiers put up a respectable fight at Purdue, losing by 14 points. Indiana’s only conference win came Feb. 4 against Iowa.
Guard Verdell Jones III has keyed Indiana’s improvement, averaging 13.5 points over his last four games.
Combined with guard Devan Dumes and forward Tom Pritchard, the young Hoosiers are starting to click and gain confidence under head coach Tom Crean.
“I knew we would play well tonight,” Crean said after the loss to Penn State. “We have had two great practices. Let’s put it this way — I would have been a lot more shocked if we didn’t play extremely hard and work at execution and defend better.”
Despite improved play all around, Indiana— which lost 75-47 to the Spartans on Feb. 7 — still ranks at or near the bottom of the Big Ten in several categories, including scoring offense (10th), scoring defense (last) and scoring margin (last).
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