1. MSU looks like a team in trouble
EAST LANSING – That game answered a lot. Almost none of it promising for Michigan State’s basketball team at the present time.
Right now, MSU isn’t close to a Big Ten contender. The Badgers, for one, are a considerably better basketball team than the Spartans. Wisconsin’s 70-57 win at Breslin Center on Tuesday night made that clear. As did the game within the game.
The Badgers battered the Spartans on the glass, 36-22, with 19 second-chance points. It felt like 50. They were the better shooting team and, outside of a seven-minute stretch in the second half, Wisconsin had more dynamic options offensively. The Badgers might be really good. They never trailed Tuesday — just like they never trailed in their win last weekend against Marquette. Sophomore transfer AJ Storr looks like a first-team All-Big Ten player, the sort of sizable, smooth and athletic wing that elevates a solid roster to contention. Good for them.
But it’s hard to tell just how impressive this was by Wisconsin because MSU isn’t very good. The Spartans only ever made a run Tuesday when Tyson Walker got hot and A.J. Hoggard started hitting 3s. That’s their only spurtable offense. Nothing sustainable. It didn’t sustain itself Tuesday. As soon as Hoggard left the game for a breather and, soon after Walker, MSU found itself going nearly five minutes without a bucket — most of it with those two on the court again.
It’s a long season. But it might just be a long season.
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2. Sissoko and Cooper together give MSU size but the price on offense is too much
I get the idea of going with Mady Sissoko and Carson Cooper as a pairing to start against Wisconsin’s sizable frontcourt duo of Tyler Wahl and Steven Crowl. In theory, it made some sense, given that Malik Hall was coming off a bout with the flu and Coen Carr is only 6-foot-5.
In reality, it only illuminated the offensive limitations of both Sissoko and Cooper and, as a tandem, made the Spartans’ struggling offense as clunky as we’ve seen it to begin a game. If you’re looking for quick starts, this wasn’t the way.
That duo was only in together for 3 minutes and 17 seconds and, while the Spartans fell behind 9-2 in that early stretch, it was the perimeter defense — on Crowl’s outside shot — that caused as much of that start as anything on the offensive end. That looked like a scouting report decision, based on how Sissoko was guarding Crowl.
But MSU also never had a chance to get off to the any sort of rhythmic start on offense, with two guys on the court who can only rebound and set screens. Especially since everyone knows it.
Hall went on to play 14 minutes in the first half, 23 for the game, and started the second half. If he was struggling, he played through it. It’s hard to have just watched that game and say playing Sissoko and Cooper together was the difference — MSU’s issues, on the offensive end and on the glass are deeper than that. But it’s certainly a pairing that, at this point in Cooper’s career, doesn’t work.
3. Freshman thoughts – the Wisconsin addition
There are times when I think MSU’s best path forward is just to put the ball in Jeremy Fears Jr.’s hands and let him grow into the game and the season. Then A.J. Hoggard will have a spell where he’s the seasoned, aggressive and multifaceted guard that we saw throughout the first half of the second half.
Fears shows flashes of the guard I think he’ll be. You see it mostly when MSU is desperate for something — like when, beginning his cut, he took a pass from Malik Hall and darted to the basket to score while drawing a foul in the first half. Or in the second half, after a Wisconsin bucket, when he attacked his defender and scored over him on on the edge of the paint. Or later when he attacked and spun and missed. It was still a terrific move and shot.
He’ll also make freshman errors — like a driving errant alley-oop attempt to Cooper a couple possessions later. But Hoggard still makes that mistake, too.
If Fears had to be MSU’s point guard, I think he’d been pretty dang good by February. MSU’s hope is that he will be anyway, even if his opportunities are more limited.
Coen Carr’s 15-foot jump shot in the second half is the sort bucket he’s got to continue to take and make. Defenses are going to continue to give it to him. The challenge for Carr right now is that he doesn’t give MSU very much in the half-court offensively right now. He’s a garbage player. That’s not a put-down. It just means his offense is on put-backs and transition baskets. That would be fine if he were the only one. But on a team with two centers that can only do the same thing, when Carr is in the game at power forward, MSU’s half-court offense is three-on-five and offers nothing in the paint. Not even to pass in and kick out.
If Carr can start knocking down open jumpers from the elbow and beyond, it’ll open up his offense and MSU’s and make the Spartans more able to play him. He’s got to keep taking them.
Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.