- After nine first-half turnovers by Michigan State basketball, the guards took over in the second half of a 75-62 victory on Friday in Ann Arbor.
- The Spartans moved into first place in the Big Ten, half a game up on Michigan.
- Tom Izzo had a simple answer: ‘I went old-school on them and threatened them at halftime.’
When halftime arrived, so did Tom Izzo’s wrath.
Michigan State basketball committed nine first-half turnovers Friday night. Its offense stagnated after a strong start. As the night went on, Michigan picked apart its interior defense and ran off 15 straight points, threatening to tighten its grip on first place in the Big Ten with a little over three weeks left in the regular season.
Yet Izzo saw a sliver of hope. Could’ve been worse, the Hall of Fame coach felt; the Spartans’ play suggested they should have been down by far more than four points to the league-leading Wolverines. In the locker room, he told his players they were “awful” in the first 20 minutes.
So what changed?
“Threatened them. Old school,” the 30th-year MSU coach said wryly. “I went old-school on them and threatened them at halftime.”
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Surely, he was joking. Right?
Not in this game. Not with this much on the line.
“We weren’t playing as ourselves, honestly,” freshman guard Jase Richardson said. “We were kind of sloppy and had a lot of turnovers. We let them go on a 15-0 run in the middle of that half. So I think it was just pickup, honestly, offensively and defensively.”
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And one by one, the 13th-ranked Spartans got one play after another, after they returned to the Crisler Center court, from the guards Izzo had said, earlier in the week, would be needed at their peak.
Richardson, the first-half stabilizer, with a 3-pointer. Struggling Jeremy Fears Jr. shaking off a bricked attempt that resulted in a shot-clock violation by draining a 3 on the next possession.
Possessed? Tre Holloman delivered another takeover stretch. Forgetting about his two errant lobs to Coen Carr late in the first half by hitting Carson Cooper for an alley-oop, then flicking a three-quarter-court, fastbreak-starting pass to Richardson, who dribbled, spun and finished in transition.
By the time the Spartans celebrated their 75-62 win, running No. 12 U-M into submission with a 9-0 finish over the final 4:12 — and a full half of precision offense and smothering defense — Izzo seemed satisfied.
MSU (22-5, 13-3 Big Ten) was back in first place with four regular-season games to play, thanks to 60 points from Richardson (21), Holloman (18), Jaden Akins (11) and Fears (10) — the combo of which accounted for 35 of the Spartans’ 41 after halftime.
“We make shots when it matters,” said Fears, who hit a pair of 3-pointers and scored eight in the second half. “I know when we played Illinois, Jaxon (Kohler) made big-time shots when it mattered. This game, Tre hit three 3s. Jase hit a corner 3 to start the half. (Carson Cooper), in the last game we played at home (against Purdue), he had two dunks back-to-back when it mattered.
“So just down the stretch really, just you never know whose time it is.”
THE GAME:Michigan State basketball stuns Crisler with 75-62 win over Wolverines to take Big Ten lead
‘Trying to go too fast’
Richardson provided the bulk of the offense in the early going. Fears had issues with not attacking or penetrating against Michigan’s zone defense. Holloman threw wild passes that led to points going back the other way for the Wolverines. Izzo felt his team played at too sped-up a pace that made his guards play recklessly and contributed to the giveaways, he felt, more so than U-M’s defense.
“We were trying to go too fast,” Izzo said. “We wanted to ‘be quick, but don’t hurry,’ as the saying goes, and we went quick and did hurry, and we turned the ball over. It was turnovers that did lead to touchdowns. Those are bad turnovers.”
Fears took ownership and started attacking the Wolverines’ zone north and south after Izzo got frustrated with his redshirt freshman floating around the perimeter and fanning out instead of attacking the basket. Holloman and Akins did the same. Then Holloman hit a heater in which he delivered a precise alley-oop for a Cooper dunk, followed by the long outlet pass to Richardson. Moments later, the junior guard drained three straight 3s to put MSU ahead by 12.
“Jase was scoring. He needed a little bit of help scoring,” said Holloman, who had 11 second-half points and finished with four assists. “They just ran a play for me, and I just got hot. In that, in that moment, I just had to make shots. And I did.”
Richardson shined start to finish, with 11 points in the first half and 10 in the second. The freshman topped 20 points for the third time since January, grabbing six rebounds and getting three of MSU’s six steals. And Akins, despite going just 4-for-14 — and 1-for-6 from 3-point range — provided a driving bankshot to set up Holloman’s hot streak, then finished off the Wolverines with two free throws and a steal and dunk in the final 50 seconds.
“I think early, offensively, I felt like I was the one kind of setting the pace for our offense,” Richardson said. “And then once we all started getting flowing, it started getting easy, started getting easier for everybody to find shots.”
Breaking down the Big Ten race
A third win in six days gave MSU a half-game lead atop the standings, over the Wolverines, who lost their first home game of the season. It also puts the Spartans in command of the conference with four games remaining, plus some time to breathe before traveling to No. 20 Maryland on Wednesday (6:30 p.m., Big Ten Network).
Izzo’s team still has to host sizzling No. 11 Wisconsin on March 2 and heads to Iowa on March 6. The Spartans host the Wolverines in both teams’ regular-season finale March 9.
Still, the Spartans are where they haven’t been in five years — in the driver’s seat for Izzo’s 11th regular-season title as March rapidly approaches.
“It’s a super-huge win for us. We knew that coming in, that (the Wolverines) were gonna be the No. 1 team, and we had to come in and set the tone,” Richardson said. “This was really special for us, but there’s still four games left. A lot of a lot could happen in four games, so we gotta close it out 4-0 and hopefully get that title.”
Contact Chris Solari:[email protected]. Follow him @chrissolari.
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