“I felt good about our team’s performance tonight,” MSU head coach Suzy Merchant said. “It was hard to get into a flow with all the fouls that were being called. I think Washington would say the same thing. It made it hard to kind of make runs and get the numbers up. It wasn’t as exciting as the last game we played, with the up-and-down nature, but you have to be able to play through that.”

There were two big positives for MSU. first, it handily beat a team it should’ve beat and, for the second straight game, the defense keyed a big run to start the game that the team wouldn’t look back from.

“We’ve done a really good job defensively in both those situations,” Merchant said. “We ran good offense … but I do think this night was a little more defense-oriented. We put back-to-back performances together where we’re jumping to the ball, we’re working together, we’re communicating better.”

The Spartans (8-3) jumped out to a 27-5 lead on Florida Gulf Coast last Sunday and went up 17-2 on the Huskies.

Washington (4-5) scored the first basket of the game after grabbing the loose tip-off and taking it in for a layup, but would miss their next 16 shots as MSU went on a 17-0 run. The Spartans went into the break with a 28-16 lead.

“I thought the first half defensively was probably the best half of ball we’ve played all the way through,” Merchant said.

The Spartans made their mark at the free-throw line in the second half, shooting 19-for-30. MSU found itself in the double bonus with about nine minutes to play.

“Especially at the start of the second half,” Washington head coach Tia Jackson said. “The six fouls in two-and-a-half minutes was hard. But it just lets us know right off the bat. It’s good that it happened then, so we knew how the calls were going to happen. But we knew there had to be a flip-side coming at some point, so we wanted to continue to attack.”

The amount of fouls was an indication of how physical and chippy the game was. With so many missed shots, there were many rebounds to be had, which led to many stretches of rough play. But all the whistles hurt the flow of the game.

“I really didn’t expect them to come out as physical as they did,” senior center Lauren Aitch said. “But I think we’re a team that can handle that. We play in the Big Ten and understand what physicalness is and I think we handled it really well.”

Washington played its best basketball in the final 10 minutes, answering MSU’s 27-point lead by putting points on the board and finishing with 52 when it looked like they wouldn’t finish with 40.

“This could’ve easily turned into a 40-point spread and it ended up being a 17-point deficit,” Jackson said. “Those last 10 minutes of the game were impressive for us.”

Four Spartans finished in double figures, led by sophomore forward Lykendra Johnson with 13 points and 11 rebounds. Aitch had 12 points and seven rebounds, and both senior center Allyssa DeHaan and sophomore guard Porsche Poole had 10.