THE REVIEW: MSU VS PURDUE

Michigan State overcame a somewhat shaky first half and pulled away after the break from the Purdue Boilermakers, blasting Matt Painter's squad back to West Lafayette by an 83-58 score.  The Spartans led by seven at the break after allowing Purdue to pound them on the offensive glass, which kept a poor shooting Boiler team within striking distance.  However, in the second half Michigan State used great ball movement to get a ton of point blank looks at the rim and wide open jumpers, and when combined with Purdue continuing to struggle shooting the ball, a blowout was inevitable.

The game was not without some interesting subplots.  The Boilers faced a horrendous travel situation, finally arriving via bus in East Lansing around 10 AM  (for a noon start).  During the game itself, Purdue coach Matt Painter had hostile verbal interactions with both MSU fans and Spartan freshman forward Branden Dawson, a player whom had been a hotly contested recruit of both schools in this contest.  In the end, the Spartans coasted to the victory but it was certainly not without some noteworthy extra-curricular activity.

THE 5 KEYS:

1.    Adversity – MSU has now seen some more adversity, losing two winnable games in a row. Both were on the road, but that's not an excuse, as the Spartans had opportunities to take each of them and didn't get it done.  In the Big Ten this year, it is critical that teams defend home court and “hold serve,” so this would fall into a must-win category even if MSU wasn't coming off a two game losing streak.  We'll see how a young team responds to the challenge that almost every Big Ten season presents at some point.

RESULT – I thought MSU was sloppy and ill-focused in the game's early minutes, but as things wore on, you saw vastly improved focus and attention to detail from the Spartans at both ends of the court.  The turnovers disappeared and MSU played a VERY strong defensive half after the break, at times flat out locking the Boilers down.  Other than a puzzlingly bad performance on the defensive glass, MSU responded exactly the way one would want to see.

2.    Offensive Rebounding – Purdue is essentially a dead even rebounding team on the season. They haven't given up a ton of offensive boards on an average basis, but opportunities should be there for the Spartans to do some damage in second chance opportunities.  Against a generally solid half court defense, that's always critical.

RESULT – It didn't end up mattering, as MSU had one of the best shooting performances of the Izzo era in this one, but they didn't get much done on the glass at either end of the court.  The Spartans only had 6 offensive rebounds and just 7 second chance points in this game.  Typically, you'd need much more of each to have a shot at beating a Purdue team, but it wasn't the case today.

3.    Turnovers – Purdue is annually the most aggressive defense on the perimeter that MSU sees in this league, and this year should be no exception.  The Boilers force 14.5 TO s per game from their opponents, so MSU is going to have to be strong with the ball in order to avoid giving Purdue extra possessions and possibly transition points.  The Spartans haven't looked consistently smooth in the last two games but those teams presented very different challenges than does Purdue.  We'll see if that makes a difference, and if MSU might be able to use their aggression against them.

RESULT – Much improved, especially considering that MSU committed a bunch of mistakes in the game's opening moments.  To only commit 11 TO s against Purdue is a nice performance, no two ways about it.  On top of that, most of the mistakes they did make weren't of the “pick six” variety...Purdue only scored 9 points off MSU turnovers.

4.    Paint – Same old story...MSU has an advantage inside and needs to make use of it.  Purdue is better off in some ways than they have been in that they at least have three big bodies besides Hummel that they can rotate in there and feel relatively comfortable with, but MSU should be able to score on the block in this game.

RESULT – Great performance by the Spartan big men.  Nix and Payne combined for 21 points and 7 boards and each had strong outings.  Nix in particular was great again, not just in terms of his scoring but with ball movement.  When you take these guys together as being one “center,”    MSU has production that matches anyone in the conference outside of Columbus, Ohio.

5.    Free Throws – For all the gnashing of teeth about MSU's free throw shooting, the Spartans are currently just a shade under the 70% mark as a team.  Purdue has really struggled all season long, coming into this game at a bit under 62%.  If it's tight and more to the point, if the game is tightly called, that may well be an advantage for the Spartans.

RESULT – The game wasn't tight and it didn't matter, but the Spartans were 16-22 as a team for    72% while Purdue was 19-24 for 79%, which might be their best performance of the entire season as a team.  The bottom line is that MSU continued to show steady, improved performance from their early season struggles at the stripe.


THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

THE GOOD:

1.    Offensive execution – This catches everything together.  MSU shot incredibly well,  hitting 60% overall, 54% from three and 72% at the line.  They only committed 11 turnovers while racking up 18 assists.  If you  took away the first 7-10 minutes of the game, the picture would have gone from very good to outstanding, as the Spartans were off the charts good at times after a somewhat rough start offensively.  Once again, I think the key is that MSU played inside-out basketball, with post touches and penetration either leading to easy looks at the rim or great kick out opportunities to wide open jump shooters, who made more than they missed.

2.    Second half  defense – MSU was solid in the first half but a lot of Purdue's troubles in the first 20 minutes were self-inflicted, to be fair.  They missed a lot of open looks.  In the second half, though, MSU locked down and the Boilers had real trouble finding any good shots.  To hold a player like Robbie Hummel to 2 points on 0-11 from the floor is spectacular, even if he was having a bit of an off-day.  It was easily one of the best defensive efforts of the season from Draymond Green in guarding Hummel.  I thought he and Branden Dawson were two guys who haven't been very good defensively of late who stepped up and were very strong in this game.

3.    Wing depth – Once again, MSU got a lot of good basketball from reserve wings Austin Thornton and Brandan Kearney.  AT had 11 points on 3-4 from three and played solid defense while Kearney went 1-2 from deep and came up with 3 steals.  These guys will make this team a much tougher out if they continue this level of play, as it gives Izzo a deeper bench to work with, some options if circumstances dictate making certain moves, and something of an insurance policy.  Both guys are doing it at both ends of the court as well, which means you don't have to play them situationally as much as just let them go when stamina or performance of the starters starts to wane.

4.    BJ – Big game for Dawson, and maybe not too surprising that it came against the team other than MSU which recruited him the hardest.  Branden was active and focused today and it showed in his results, with a team (and career) high 14 points on 6-7 from the floor.  Maybe just as impressively, I thought this was the best Dawson has checked in a long time, maybe since the beginning of the season.

THE BAD AND THE UGLY

1.    Defensive rebounding – Giving up 18 offensive boards to anyone is a crime in Spartanland. Giving them up to a mediocre at best rebounding team like Purdue is just difficult to understand. You can give MSU a little bit of a pass on some of it because of all the long rebounds as a result of the jump shooting Boiler offense...but that excuse only goes so far.  Hard to get angry about much in a 25 point win but this would be the area Izzo would focus on in terms of negatives.

MSU ends its second losing streak of the season at 2 games.  The last time the Spartans lost 2, they rattled off 15 wins in a row after that.  I don't think it's realistic to expect that to happen again, but it was important that MSU hold serve, beat a team they should beat at home, and get some of the bad taste of the Northwestern and Michigan games out of their mouths.  Safe to say that all of that was accomplished with this victory.

The 5-2 Spartans are off until Wednesday night when they'll host the Minnesota Golden Gophers at the Breslin Center.  Again, given the opponent and the setting, nothing short of a Spartan win will be acceptable.