Michigan State basketball: The Jaxon Kohler boost will be welcomed

For the first time since the start of the season, we saw Jaxon Kohler warming up with Michigan State basketball. He was going through warmups with the Spartans prior to the Indiana State game which was a good sign and it lines up with the recent timeline that Tom Izzo revealed.

When Kohler was originally ruled out with a foot injury at the start of the season, Izzo said that he expected to get him back by Christmas. That clearly didn't happen.

On Saturday, he was on the court with the team for the first time all year.

With Kohler potentially returning to action next week against Penn State or on the road against either Northwestern or Illinois, it's time to adjust expectations for this team as well as for Kohler.

The team has lacked post scoring all season as Mady Sissoko has been more of a defender and rebounder (on a good night) and Carson Cooper just hasn't taken the necessary steps to play starter's minutes. Both have struggled on the offensive end of the floor. That should change with Kohler back, even if he is rusty.

A year ago, he averaged 3.0 points and 2.0 rebounds per game and shot just over 50 percent from the field in 10.8 minutes per game. But from all accounts, he had a huge summer.

If he truly made progress as a player, I'd expect him to average somewhere around 6-7 points and 4-5 rebounds per game which is obviously a nice little boost every game in the post. That's about 6-7 points that we normally wouldn't expect from the Spartan bigs.

This boost will be more than welcomed and it'll be here soon, folks.