Michigan State Basketball: Positives and negatives from EMU win

Michigan State basketball took care of business at home in game one. That being said, they didn’t make it pretty against a decimated EMU team.

If you had no context for any part of this game, you’d assume this was a game against two fully healthy teams in the same conference. The two teams played relatively close for the entire two hours despite the less talented team missing almost half of its roster. It was game one and the Spartans made that obvious with early struggles against Eastern Michigan.

It wasn’t horrible; Michigan State only trailed early in the game for a short period of time, but they struggled to separate the entire game. Even though it never felt like Eastern had much of a chance to win, Tom Izzo’s squad couldn’t put them out until extremely late. But that’s what was so weird to me while I was watching the game; the team didn’t look bad.

Any errors could be attributed to some early-season rust or miscommunications after a weird offseason and a fair amount of roster turnover. The biggest worry wasn’t something that would stick out to every fan watching this game. To me, the concern that this game left me with was that the team lacked a leader.

And while this can largely be the result of a Cassius Winston-related hangover, this is something that Izzo should be looking for as the season progresses. If you look back at every great Michigan State basketball team, they’ve all had a leader.

We did see good performances from Foster Loyer, Joey Hauser and Gabe Brown, but nobody really stepped up and guided this team.

That being said, I’ll go through what went right and what went wrong in this game.