Michigan State Holiday Wish List 2018: Wish No. 8 for Spartan fans

Michigan State’s 25 wishes list continues today and will run over the next week. What is the No. 8 wish for all Spartan fans?

Here is wish No. 8 on our Michigan State fan wish list as we count down to wish No. 1.

Wish No. 8

The men’s basketball team will be outright Big Ten regular season and Big Ten Tournament champions.

This is not remotely impossible and this is an aspiration that Spartan fans can get behind and believe in. Some may be thinking that I’m just talking about more unrealistic wishes with little possibility of them coming true. However, even though the odds are not favorable for this wish, this Spartan team may have what it takes to do it.

This Michigan State team also would not be the first Spartan team to win both, either; it would be the fourth time since the Big Ten started having the conference tournament going back to 1998. Let’s look at the history of championships in the Big Ten for Michigan State post-former head coach Jud Heathcote.

Looking at the history under head coach Tom Izzo in conference play, the Spartans have laid claim to a Big Ten regular season title for the years of 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001 and then a long stretch of no regular season championships until 2009 and then again in 2010, 2012 and most recently in 2018.

Izzo has made it known that he highly values regular season conference titles and in the last 20 years, no Big Ten team has come close to as many regular season titles as Michigan State which has eight during that span.

Even though Izzo doesn’t like to hang banners up in the ceiling of the Breslin Center for conference tourney titles, Michigan State won the Big Ten Tournament in 1999 and 2000. Then there was a long period of no conference tournament titles until the Spartans won it in 2012, 2014 and lastly in 2016.

Out of any Big Ten team, no one has won as many Big Ten Tournament titles as Michigan State, who has won it five times. So how did the Spartans fare when they won both?

The three seasons that Michigan State won both the regular season and the tournament titles were in 1999, 2000 and 2012.

In 1999, the Spartans made it to the Final Four, in 2000, they won the national championship and in 2012, they made it to the Sweet 16. This season’s team, out of these three mentioned, resembles more of the 2012 team than the 1999 and 2000 teams.

They are similar because both teams played a tough non-conference schedule with only two losses before the new year. Both teams possess solid depth with no necessarily superstars but good to great players.

The 2012 team had Draymond Green, Keith Appling, Branden Dawson, Travis Trice and solid players like Derrick Nix as well as young and upcoming players like Adreian Payne. Granted Green would be become a great NBA player but no one had predicted that in college, hence why he was a second-round pick.

This year’s team, led by the ‘Big 3’ of Cassius Winston, Joshua Langford and Nick Ward, could end up being great college players but not likely NBA lottery picks like Miles Bridges and Jaren Jackson Jr. It has depth like in 2012 with Kenny Goins, Matthew McQuaid, Xavier Tillman and Kyle Ahrens and young talent with five talented freshmen.

It feels like the season’s Michigan State team has a decent chance to win both titles. The Big Ten has a ton of depth this season unlike last year. However, with Michigan State having more experience and depth compared to their Big Ten counterparts, I can see the Spartans having a good January and February heading into March.

Last season, you saw the Wolverines emerge late in the Big Ten season to win the conference tournament and no disrespect to this season’s teams of Michigan, Ohio State or Wisconsin but Michigan State has that look and feel of a very consistent team that can handle those tough periods of time where you are playing four games in ten days for example. I strongly believe that this Michigan State team is the best team in the Big Ten.

As we head closer to Wish No. 1, expected the wishes to get much better in terms of wanting more than actually expecting a high percentage of them to come true. Now, let’s hope that this wish has a chance — yes a chance — of coming true.