Michigan State Basketball: Matt McQuaid needs to be a shooter again

Michigan State basketball is expected to be one of the nation’s best for 2017-18, but that won’t happen unless it gets more Matt McQuaid.

If you take away his name, high school picture and change his class to 2017, a lot of people would be hyped for Matt McQuaid for the upcoming season. He’s a 6-foot-4 guard that can shoot and “make a play for a teammate when he draws multiple defenders.”

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According to ESPN Recruiting, he is long, sneaky athletic, an underrated defender and has an excellent feel for the game to match his basketball IQ. Another strong quote is that “he simply knows how to play and has a much more well-rounded game than he gets credit for.”

Let’s stew in those words for a bit and try not to think about the last two years.

If a four-star recruit came to Michigan State with that hype, he’d be looked at as a bonus to this year’s roster. Instead, McQuaid has turned into a problem entering his third season for Tom Izzo. There have been few positives to take away from the last two years and while he’s had numerous injuries, McQuaid’s still played in 69 games.

His outlook as a freshman was slightly better, mainly because he played less and hit a few key threes. Even at KenPom, McQuaid’s freshman numbers were comparable to those of Caris LeVert in his first season. LeVert was a two-star guard not ranked in the Top 200 by many sites that is now playing in the NBA. He’s also three inches taller than McQuaid so I’ll end the comparisons there.

As a sophomore, McQuaid became a player that almost only shot threes. Despite averaging 5.2 more minutes per game, he took just six more shots inside the arc than as a freshman. That’s not a terrible thing, but as a four-star guard, fans were hoping for a little more, at least one that could make layups.

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Then again, McQuaid may have seen his 36-of-100 shooting from two-point land and decided to shy away from them. Another issue was that he was a worse three-point shooter at 35 percent, down from 40.9 percent as a freshman. In conference play, the player labeled as a shooter was just 14-of-42 from long range.

Sure, he had a good game here and there, but those more often than not came against weaker competition. The only times he scored in double digits since mid-December were against Rutgers, Purdue and Wisconsin.

Against the Boilermakers, Michigan State was down from the start and McQuaid capped off the demolition by scoring a last-second, wide-open layup to give him 11 points in a 17-point loss. The Wisconsin game is the extreme outlier as most of the shots he made have never been replicated by him on the collegiate level. We can chalk that up to McQuaid simply ‘feeling it’ and nothing to rely on going forward.

According to some, McQuaid may be the key to the upcoming Michigan State basketball season (I think Joshua Langford is). That’s a great sentiment, but even in the article the writer says “the Spartans can surely win a bunch of games without much from McQuaid.”

McQuaid is more so the player that can push MSU over the top. There will undoubtedly be times he costs the team because he can’t keep up with faster guards (as seen in the Indiana game last year), but it’ll be extremely important for him to play competent basketball in every game with little depth in the backcourt.

Unless Langford turns into an all-conference player, McQuaid will see significant time this season. If he shoots less than 40 percent from deep again to go with a subpar rate inside the arc and mediocre defense, McQuaid will see even more criticism from the fan base.

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With so much attention going to guys like Miles Bridges, Jaren Jackson Jr. and Nick Ward, McQuaid is going to have a lot of open looks. If those shots don’t fall, things will go from bad to worse for the four-star guard that once said, “I don’t want to be just a shooter. I want to be a player.” Before McQuaid can become a player, he needs to be a shooter.