Michigan State basketball: 3 improvements to make ahead of Sweet 16

2. Clean up the turnovers

In both games, we saw Michigan State turn the ball over many times. In their first round game against Bradley, the Spartans only turned the rock over nine times. However, come Saturday when the Spartans played Minnesota they turned the ball over 22 times. They were still able to win easily but they cannot count on LSU or others teams to shoot as poorly as Minnesota did.

Other teams will take advantage of the turnovers and Michigan State will surely find itself in a deeper hole than what it can get out of.

What Michigan State has to do to not turn the ball over so much is make better passes — this is what is boils down to. Michigan State needs to make crisp entry passes to get the ball down low to Nick Ward and Xavier Tillman. The players also have to step towards the ball and not let the ball come to them. This is because against Minnesota, we saw MSU players waiting for the ball to come to them and the Gophers were getting their hand inside to break it up which caused turnovers.

If Ward and Tillman would have taken just a quick step out to meet the ball as it was coming to them, the Gophers would not have had the position or the length to get their hands in to knock the ball out. If they try, they’ll fail and potentially pick up a foul.

Another thing the Spartans can do is utilize the pump fake for passing as well. We saw a few times when Cassius Winston stops jumps and throws a pass to the wing player. If we watch and scout him, we see him do this at least once or twice a game. Along with that he never pump fakes when he does this so defenders just need to jump up and they will get a hand on the ball and it will result in a turnover. If Winston uses that pump fake just once it will get the defender off his feet and then he can get a better pass around to his guys.

MSU will need to work on getting these turnover numbers down — 22 is too many if it wants to win in the Sweet 16, and beyond.