EAST LANSING – Michigan State has its worst late-February record in decades, sitting at two games above .500 at 11-9 and far from the bubble of the NCAA Tournament.
And it hasn’t even gotten to the hardest part of its season yet.
That part will start on Tuesday, when the Spartans welcome No. 5 Illinois to the Breslin Center (7 p.m., FS1).
That game will kick off a stretch of 13 days in which the Spartans will play six games, one that almost certainly marks the most condensed stretch of regular season conference games in program history.
“It’s going to be a hellacious couple of days,” Spartans coach Tom Izzo said on Monday.
The stretch is unique both for the difficulty of the opposition and for how condensed it is.
Four of those six games are against teams currently ranked in the top five of the Associated Press poll. In addition to Illinois, the Spartans will play No. 4 Ohio State on Thursday and No. 3 Michigan twice in the final four days of the season. The Spartans haven’t played more than three top-five opponents in a single season in at least the last decade, let alone in a 13-day span.
The stretch was created by postponements both from Michigan State and from Michigan. The Spartans’ games against Illinois on Tuesday and Indiana next Tuesday were rescheduled from January, when the Spartans went 20 days without playing a game due to COVID-19 cases. A game against Michigan was postponed during the Wolverines’ athletic department-wide shutdown this month.
Looking at the stretch as a whole can be overwhelming. So even more so than usual, Michigan State is emphasizing a game-at-a-time philosophy for the next two weeks.
“You have to take that approach,” Spartans junior forward Aaron Henry said. “You try to look at it with that perspective of so many games in so many days, you lose yourself within it. You’ve got to win each and every day, even the days we don’t have games.”
While the stretch may be “hellacious”, in Izzo’s evaluation, it also presents an opportunity.
At 11-9 overall, Michigan State is currently outside of the NCAA Tournament picture. But the strength of this year’s Big Ten provides nearly nightly opportunities for marquee wins and provides the Spartans a potential path to the tournament despite their record.
Players aren’t thinking past Tuesday, but they know the program’s streak of 22 consecutive NCAA Tournaments is on the line in the next two weeks.
“We know what’s at stake,” Henry said.
Michigan State took a step in the right direction on Saturday, when it scored 52 second-half points and turned a double-digit deficit into a seven-point win at Indiana. Henry matched his career-high with 27 points in that game, while Gabe Brown, Joshua Langford and Rocket Watts all had resurgent efforts.
The road gets tougher on Tuesday, though. Illinois will come in having won seven straight games, most recently by 31 points on the road at Minnesota on Saturday.
Illini guard Ayo Dosunmu is making a run at Big Ten Player of the Year honors, averaging 21 points per game in his last four, plus 8.3 assists and 5.3 rebounds while shooting better than 50 percent from the field and 3-point range.
He’s balanced by the inside presence of 7-foot Kofi Cockburn, who averages 17.6 points per game and is the Big Ten’s leading rebounder at 10.3 per game.
Cockburn is the latest defensive challenge in a season that Izzo says contains the Big Ten’s best crop of big men that he’s ever seen. That’s constantly had Michigan State choosing how often to double-team the low post versus potentially allow open 3-pointers, something he and his staff will do again on Tuesday.
“Sometimes you pick your poison if you’re not really strong everywhere,” Izzo said.
That choice presents another challenge for the end of the season. But Izzo is seeing late-season challenges as opportunities and a chance to turn the season around.
“We have great opportunities,” Izzo said.
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February 23, 2021 at 06:07PM
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Michigan State starts hectic and difficult season-ending stretch with No. 5 Illinois - MLive.com
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