There are two ways a team can look at six scheduled games in a 13-day span. It can be a daunting task or an “incredible opportunity,” and for MSU men's basketball Head Coach Tom Izzo it’s the latter.
“It’s going to be a hellacious couple of days,” Izzo said to reporters Monday, elaborating on his team's single day of prep between each game over the next two weeks. "... But it’s also an incredible opportunity, so we are going to look at as the second one that it’s an incredible opportunity and see what we can do with it.”
Returning home from Indiana with a tally in the win column was a confidence boost for a team that was “fed up” with losing, as junior forward Aaron Henry put it. However, it doesn’t make up for the mishaps Michigan State suffered throughout the majority of their season.
“We won a game," Izzo said. "You’re at Michigan State; you’re supposed to win games. Let’s learn from why we won the game. ... Let’s look at why we won the game, and when we did that we found a lot of positive things we did. … We did not come back and celebrate because there’s nothing to celebrate.”
At Indiana, MSU shot their best since they had on Jan. 2 against Nebraska. The stats, for once, seemed to fall in Michigan State's favor, but Henry said the team will take away more than what was shown on paper.
“The connectedness that we had, the positive mindset that everybody took to and how fun it was to win,” Henry said. “I feel like we haven’t felt that as much. It’s been sporadic every now and then, just that feeling that Spartans get when we win it's exciting, and hopefully we can build on that, and we can continue to play at that level.”
As Izzo put it, the team's performance at Indiana is something to build on, not to celebrate. The Spartans are still playing catch up with their 5-9 conference record to keep any speck of post season hope alive.
The next two weeks will mimic the schedule of a professional basketball team in many ways. Four of MSU's final six games are matched against current top 5 opponents. To make the stakes higher, the season will conclude with back-to-back Spartan matchups against in-state rival and Big Ten conference leader No. 3 Michigan.
“If you try to look at it with that perspective of so many games in so many days you’ll lose yourself within it,” Henry said. “You’ve got to win each and every day, even the days we don’t have games. It isn’t many, but you’ve got to approach every day trying to get better.”
Izzo echoed that one-day-at-a-time mindset, not talking about any team other than Illinois.
“What I’m talking about is Illinois, Illinois, Illinois,” Izzo said. “It’s an opportunity to win a game, and if we win a game we constantly reassess where we are.”
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