But what if the players don’t need to talk?

What if they can communicate while shoving aside all the other noise?

That’s chemistry.

And junior forwards Draymond Green and Delvon Roe have developed a chemistry that has paid dividends for the MSU men’s basketball team this season.

“They can switch and move and do things, and I swear you don’t even know it,” MSU men’s basketball head coach Tom Izzo said last week. “They just have a knack with one another that they feel for one another.

“Usually you want guys communicating; those guys don’t communicate as much, they just do it. The only thing that makes me mad about that is when another guy comes in, it’s not as smooth. They have done a great job with that and those guys are good together.”

Green and Roe have had more than two and a half years to grow together on the court, especially in big-game situations (Roe started the 2009 national championship game and Green was last season’s Big Ten Sixth Man of the Year averaging 25 minutes per game).

“It’s from playing with each other for so long,” Roe said. “Whenever you play with somebody for two years, even going back into high school a little bit when we played (Amateur Athletic Union games against each other), you start to get the feel for each other and what other people like to do.”

Roe, a five-star recruit, committed to MSU in April of 2007 and Green, a three-star recruit, committed a few months later.

“When I committed, Delvon was the first person I heard from,” Green said.

“(Roe said) congratulations, get it done and all those things. Our friendship has come a long way.”

When the two arrived in East Lansing for their freshman seasons, their similar styles of play worked well together.

“We were pretty similar,” Roe said. “We’ve got a lot of versatility and can do a lot of things on the court. The most important thing was the basketball IQ. We knew a lot about the game right away as
freshmen. We picked up on stuff quickly and I think that’s really translated into this year.”

The basketball IQ will be important when the Spartans take on Northwestern on Saturday (1 p.m., Big Ten Network).

“You’ve got to be able to know when a switch is coming or when a backdoor is coming because they run so many of those backdoors and ball screens,” Roe said.

“You have to be pretty aware and have a good basketball IQ to play against that team.”

Since Big Ten play has begun, Izzo has been trying to pair Green and Roe together more in games.

In MSU’s three Big Ten wins this season, both Green and Roe have played at least 27 minutes each. In last Saturday’s loss to Penn State, Roe was hampered by foul trouble and played just 20 minutes.

“I just wasn’t able to play (Green and Roe) together a lot,” Izzo said.

“It just seemed like the rotation would go and at the end of the game we’d go, ‘How much did Green and Roe play together?’ and it was like six minutes, eight minutes, for different reasons.”

“Now we can get 20-something minutes out of them for different reasons and I think it’s been better defensively and it’s been better offensively because they just kind of have a better understanding of where they’re going.”