3 takeaways from Michigan State basketball's Senior Night win over Northwestern

1. This team is NCAA Tournament bound

Barring some sort of extreme meltdown or unprecedented disrespect from the selection committee, Michigan State is likely in the NCAA Tournament.

Many experts believed that Wednesday night's game against Northwestern was a "win and you're in" game for Michigan State and I tend to agree. While I think Michigan State was in either way, a win over Northwestern would have taken a lot of that stress away on Selection Sunday. Obviously winning at Indiana on Sunday will be important, too, but that's not as much of a must-win as the Northwestern game was.

Now that Michigan State is likely in the NCAA Tournament regardless of what happens from this point forward, it can focus on playing freely and that may lead to some of its best basketball of the season.

We saw what that did against Purdue in Mackey and it led to a close game and the Spartans looked the best they had in weeks.

Michigan State is headed to the tournament for the 26th straight year and hopefully it can shake off the disappointment from the regular season and piece together a run.