John Niyo: With balance and buy-in, this Michigan State team appears built for long march

EAST LANSING, Mich. — December was perfect. January was, too.

But if you ask the coach whose favorite time of year is fast approaching on the calendar — January, February, … — he’ll remind you that chasing perfection really is an endless march. On an uneven path.

“And I just think the road’s gonna get a little rocky here,” Michigan State coach Tom Izzo cautioned Tuesday night, after his Spartans remained unbeaten (9-0) in the Big Ten with a 73-51 rout of Minnesota at the Breslin Center. “So hang on.”

Buckle up, sure. That’s always good advice. But even Izzo has to admit this Michigan State team is better equipped to handle the road ahead than some of his recent rides. And based on what's in the rearview mirror already, Michigan State fans might want to get comfortable with the idea these Spartans really are capable of going the distance.

They’ve now won 13 consecutive games for the first time since the 2018-19 season, which is the last time they started 9-0 in Big Ten play as well. Perhaps not coincidentally, that was also MSU’s last Final Four team. And after going unbeaten in both December (5-0) and January (7-0) for the first time in his 30-year head-coaching career, Izzo figures that counts for something, at least.

'On the same page'

Yes, the Spartans’ back-loaded schedule will get tougher in February, starting with a trip to Los Angeles to face USC and UCLA. After that, there's just one game remaining on the schedule — a Feb. 11 home date with Indiana — that wouldn't qualify as a Quad 1 win, based on the current NET ratings. And, of course, adversity is always just around the corner. Losses, injuries, and so on.

“But I don't want to diminish what we've done, either,” Izzo said. “Because we've done some incredible things and we have stayed focused.”

And balanced. And those are no small things, especially in this transient era of college basketball, where players come and go and coaches are stuck behind the wheel without any power steering.

That’s just one reason why Ben Johnson — the Minnesota coach, not the Chicago one — was so effusive in his praise for Izzo and his team after his Golden Gophers got buried at the Breslin Center on Tuesday night. Johnson raved about the Spartans’ selflessness and a “built-in culture” that’s been swelling like a wave ever since a trip to Maui at Thanksgiving.

“He's got those guys all on the same page, and they're all connected,” said Johnson, whose team had won three straight coming in, two of them against ranked teams in Michigan and Oregon. “I mean, you can feel it on the floor. You could sense it.

“And the guys that they got (in the transfer portal) are their type of system guys that fit. They're not rocking the boat. And so now it's managing the ego part of it, saying, ‘All right, if we're going to make a really good run at this, ‘we’ is bigger than ‘me.’ And just the way they play, the body language … I didn't get the feeling like they're gonna sway from that.”

No, that’s not the way this team is wired. Izzo has been telling us that since the summer, as nine returning players locked arms with a couple of transfers and a trio of freshmen to form “as close a group as I've had in a while,” he says, where “everyone is helping each other."

That wasn’t necessarily the case the past few years, and “I don't know totally why,” Izzo says. “But I don't blame the players that were here. I blame me.”

Sticking to his standards

What he won't do, though, is blame his value system. Instead, he doubled down on it after the Spartans finished 20-15 last spring — a fourth straight season with 13 or more losses — and failed to reach the second week of the NCAA Tournament for a third time in four years.

“I stuck to some of my standards, that a relationship-based team is still more important than this craziness that's going on,” he said. “It made me even more driven to make sure I did more things that would help us be connected. … I think my staff deserves a little credit for that. But I think the players deserve a lot of credit for that. They bought in.”

Off the court and on it, where the minutes are spread so evenly it’s sometimes hard to tell who’s a starter and who’s not. Ten players are averaging between 14 and 26 minutes per game, and Michigan State’s leading scorer (Jaden Akins, 13.6 ppg) ranks 27th in the Big Ten at the moment. And while this may not be Izzo’s most talented team, all that depth and mix-and-match variety does pack a punch. In fact, after Tuesday night’s pummeling, Johnson was comparing these Spartans to the Pittsburgh Steelers, which had to be music to Izzo’s football-loving ears.

“They're so deep and balanced, and you just look at their box score,” the Gophers’ coach said, rattling off the individual point totals that sounded more like rolls at the craps table. “It's just like every guy comes in and they're productive. And over the course of a game, it's just like ‘Body blow, body blow, body blow.’ … They can just rotate guys, and they still play with that same identity and that same force.”

Izzo knows he may be forced to shorten that bench a bit as competition ratchets up in the coming weeks, though he insists “the strength in numbers thing is real” and should help even more as the bicoastal Big Ten travel really begins to wear on teams this winter.

But he also feels as if he has an answer somewhere on his bench for just about every problem opponents can create. Big lineups and small. Pack-line defenses or in-your-face pressure on the perimeter. Up-tempo games or rock fights.

And the way this team rebounds and defends — two staples of almost every great MSU team under Izzo — there’s a sense that the floor is higher than it has been in years. As for the ceiling, “I don't know where it is,” Izzo shrugged. “But, I mean, I think this: We are not maxing out.”

Not yet, anyway. He knows he’ll need more from Akins down the stretch — the senior has struggled offensively the past few games — and ideally he’d be the “real go-to guy” Izzo says his staff is still seeking. Michigan State’s going to need continued improvement from an athletic trio of youngsters in Jeremy Fears Jr., Jase Richardson and Coen Carr as well, though Fears and Richardson combined for 14 assists and just one turnover Tuesday. And Xavier Booker remains an X-factor if this team is going to make a deep run in March.

As a group, the Spartans simply must shoot better, too. Michigan State ranks 344th nationally in 3-point accuracy, knocking down just 28.9% of their attempts on the season. It has been a bit better in conference play (33.1%), but as Izzo noted this week, “if we can get that thing up to 36-37 (percent), then I'd be ready to say that a good team moves into the next category.”

Still, even as Izzo approaches another coaching milestone — he can tie Bob Knight’s all-time record of 353 Big Ten wins Saturday at USC — he knows what flipping the calendar really means.

“I’ve been in this long enough,” he said, “where it’s about getting better every game right now.”