Men’s basketball head coach Tom Izzo talks to sophomore guard Travis trice during the second round of the Big Ten Tournament against Iowa on March 15, 2013, at United Center in Chicago, Ill. The Spartans beat the Hawkeyes 59-56. Natalie Kolb/The State News
Chicago — Now that the Spartans have fought their way into the Big Ten Tournament’s semifinals, it’s time to look ahead to the team standing in their way from a return trip to the championship round.
The No. 8 MSU men’s basketball team (25-7) will square off against the team they beat in the finals of last year’s tournament, No. 10 Ohio State (24-7), after the Buckeyes dismantled Nebraska a few hours earlier.
Winners of six in a row and seven of their past eight, the Buckeyes are the Big Ten’s hottest team, featuring wins against then-No. 2 Indiana and then-No.4 MSU during that stretch.
To avoid a similar fate, the Spartans, and junior guard Keith Appling in particular, will have to do a better job against guard Aaron Craft, who torched MSU for a career-high 21 points and six assists while limiting Appling to three points, three turnovers and one assist in the teams’ previous meeting.
The Buckeyes shot an astounding 17-for-22 (77.3 percent) in the second half of their quarterfinal victory Friday night and are on a mission to take home the title they narrowly missed out on a year before.
“If we are in a game, we are going to play as well as we can, hopefully, and we are going to try to win. We are not here to just kind of have fun and be in a new city,” Craft said.
“This is an opportunity to hopefully put another banner up in the gym and that’s the way to look at it, trying to take it one game at a time and hopefully we can be there at the end again.”
Ohio State also will have rest on its side, with only three players logging more than 25 minutes of playing time in their quarterfinal victory against Nebraska, and no one playing more than 32 minutes. Compare that to MSU, which had four players register 30 minutes or more, including a game-high 39 minutes for Appling.
For MSU, it’s not just the minutes extended, but the fact they were taxing, high energy ones as part of a frenetic comeback that could cause the Spartans the biggest problem on Saturday.
Rallying from a 36-minute deficit isn’t easy, but bouncing back less than 15 hours later is even tougher.
“You can’t get up for every game,” MSU head coach Tom Izzo said. “You have to have one of those letdown games, and boy, we haven’t had many games where we could just play average and win.
“To win three games in a row or six games in the NCAA Tournament, sometimes you have got to find a way.”
With that in mind, Saturday’s result might have less to do with scheme and execution and more to do with how much gas the Spartans still have left in the tank.
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