Michigan State picked up a much-needed win over UCLA on Tuesday night to improve to 21-5 on the season and 11-4 in Big Ten play with just five regular-season games left.
That’s right, there are only two games left at the Breslin Center this season, and the Big Ten title is essentially out of play. It’s truly a bittersweet time of year. Michigan State needs to protect home-court advantage like it did against UCLA in order to be in the running for a 2/3-seed.
The Spartans still have work to do even after a 23-point win over UCLA, however.
Is it annoying to critique a blowout win? Yes, but that’s kind of my job.
1. Turnovers
Once again, turnovers were an issue, and a lot of them were just unforced and sloppy. There weren’t too many things that I disliked from the 23-point throttling of UCLA, but the turnovers did kind of drive me insane once again.
Michigan State finished with 14 turnovers, but the one that probably drove me the most insane was the out-of-timeout debacle at the end of the first half.
Tom Izzo calls a timeout to draw up a play with about a minute left, the Spartans come out, dribble the clock down, get the ball to Coen Carr on the wing with time winding down and he drives and falls to the ground, turning the ball over on a travel. That’s out of a timeout. That’s on everyone.
2. Losing the offensive rebounding battle
Am I being nit-picky here? Yeah, probably, but there aren’t many things to dislike from a 23-point win where the Spartans essentially led wire-to-wire. Giving up nine UCLA offensive rebounds to grabbing just eight was not my favorite part of the game.
Granted, Michigan State had far fewer chances to grab offensive rebounds than UCLA. Michigan State missed 26 shots and grabbed eight offensive rebounds and UCLA missed 36 and grabbed nine. Still, I don’t ever like seeing Michigan State lose the offensive rebounding battle because it’s way too good on the glass for that to happen — especially against this poor rebounding UCLA team.
3. Three Trey Fort shots
I’m going to harp on this until I’m blue in the face, but Trey Fort needs to be shooting the ball more. I know a lot of this has to do with the game plan, but Izzo knows that he has a potential sharpshooter in Fort and his offense could raise the ceiling of this team come March. He needs to make sure Fort is shooting way more than three times in 10-plus minutes of action.
Fort was playing pretty well against UCLA, grabbing four rebounds and hitting a three in 11 minutes, but he passed up a couple of open shots — he’s being unselfish, to be fair.
I’d like five-plus Trey Fort shots per game.