I even wrote about it after the Michigan game<\/a>, but Jaxon Kohler needs to see the court more.<\/p>\nKohler and Carson Cooper were the best bigs on the court for Michigan State on Saturday night in Ann Arbor and Jaxon just gives the Spartans a boost offensively. He only played eight minutes and still had four points, three rebounds, and a block.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Mady Sissoko’s struggles continued and the rebounding and defense suffered because of it.<\/p>\n
2. Rebounding was horrendous<\/h3>\n
I don’t know how many times an offensive rebound led to a second-chance bucket for Michigan, but it felt like about 90 percent of the time. Heck, there was one sequence where Michigan snagged 4-5 offensive boards and held onto the ball for a good minute and finished with a basket.<\/p>\n
That just cannot happen again.<\/p>\n
You can bet Tom Izzo is going to run a war drill at practice this week to focus on rebounding but I’ll chalk this up to the week that these guys had emotionally. They played a really solid game for about 30-35 minutes and just were worn down mentally and physically down the stretch.<\/p>\n
But this rebounding effort (-13) cannot happen in March nor in these final 4-5 games.<\/p>\n
3. If this team could only play a full 40 minutes, it’d be scary<\/h3>\n
This is probably the most frustrating thought I had from the loss on Saturday night. If Michigan State could only piece together a full 40-minute effort, the Spartans would arguably be one of the best teams in the country.<\/p>\n
Think about it, Michigan State fell apart after controlling the Gonzaga game earlier in the year, lost at Illinois despite having a nine-point second-half lead, lost to Purdue despite holding a four-point lead late, lost to Indiana despite getting off to a red-hot start, and lost at Michigan on Saturday night despite controlling the game for 30-plus minutes. Heck, Michigan State looked like the better team for about 80 percent of the game before melting down in the final eight minutes.<\/p>\n
Izzo said it best after the loss: “I asked for 40 minutes of focus. I got 38.”<\/p>\n
A complete 40-minute effort from this Michigan State basketball team would be a scary thought for the rest of college basketball. That’s the difference between this team being 16-10 and 21-5, at least.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This one hurt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1441,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[187],"tags":[59,201,190,189],"class_list":["post-1432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-basketball","tag-featured","tag-jaxon-kohler","tag-michigan-state-basketball","tag-michigan-state-spartans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}