EAST LANSING, MICH. -- As they walked off the court in East Lansing, Mich., together, Michigan State Coach Tom Izzo tried to put together a few comforting words for IU Coach Tom Crean.
Izzo told Crean his Spartans’ 70-50 win against the Hoosiers was the best he had seen his Michigan State team play all year. The blowout loss may have been just as much his team’s exceptional play as IU’s poor play.
Maybe that was true, Crean acknowledged, or maybe it was Izzo was just doing what all good friends do.
The Hoosiers’ 20-point loss was its worst of the season and left Crean without much explanation afterwards. IU, the Big Ten’s most efficient offense, shot just 28.3 percent from the floor in its least productive night of the season.
The Spartans (10-5, 1-1) buried the Hoosiers (11-4, 1-1) quickly with a 19-4 run over the first 10 minutes of the game as IU’s offense spun its wheels, looking for an answer that wouldn’t be found.
“I thought our leadership was left somewhere back in Bloomington,” Crean said. “And I guess that falls on me because we didn’t have any leadership in that game whatsoever.”
Heading into halftime, IU trailed 36-17 after shooting just 5-for-28 from the field.
In the second half, it didn’t get easier.
The offense was mostly stagnant. Crean said that cuts weren’t sharp. Communication wasn’t there. Players weren’t boxing out or running in transition the way IU had been practicing.
Without anyone clearly stepping up—no Hoosier who took more than four shots shot better than 50 percent from the field—IU slipped further and further behind. At one point, the Michigan State lead was up to 30 with 13 minutes left to play.
“We didn’t respond to adversity tonight,” junior guard Nick Zeisloft said.
The most frustrating part for the Hoosiers was the effort—or rather the lack of it, which Crean and junior guard Yogi Ferrell both said was evident on the boards.
Michigan State outrebounded IU 50-28 which led to 17 second-chance points. The Spartans had as many offensive rebounds (17) as IU did defensive boards.
“They killed us on rebounding,” Ferrell said. “We didn’t have any effort on defensive rebounding.”
If it could have gone wrong for IU, it probably did.
The dulled offense was amplified by a poor defense that allowed Michigan State to shoot 46.7 percent from the floor.
Only Ferrell scored in double digits for IU, recording 17 points. Freshman James Blackmon, Jr., IU’s leading scorer at 17.2 points per game, was 0-for-8 in the first half and finished the game with six points on 1-for-14 shooting.
Crean said he doesn’t name team captains, not wanting to put a “C” on any one particular players’ chest. It wouldn’t have mattered if he did, he said. After Monday’s loss, he would have just ended up taking them away.
IU led for 14 seconds, but those 14 seconds quickly became a footnote in the boxscore of a blowout loss.
“We got on our heels, and we didn’t respond,” Crean said. “We just, we didn’t do anything.”
