Tom Izzo and Michigan State basketball will be back in action on Wednesday night against No. 12 North Carolina and it’ll be yet another tough test for the Spartans.<\/p>\n
North Carolina, like Michigan State, is coming off a disappointing loss on Tuesday. The Tar Heels lost by 13 points to a really good Auburn team and they gave up 85 points in the process. The Spartans lost 71-63 to Memphis after drawing close a couple of times and then fading away because of some sharp-shooting by the Tigers’ star guard.<\/p>\n
But that’s in the past. It’s time to look ahead to the North Carolina matchup in the third-place game of the Maui Invitational on Wednesday night.<\/p>\n
Here are three of my boldest predictions.<\/p>\n
Jaden Akins had an impressive showing against Memphis but he accounted for just 12 points with five rebounds, making 5-of-11 shooting. He also made a couple of threes and looked all-around solid compared to his offensive performance on Monday. He’s going to have a big game yet again, making 8-of-15 shots with 21 points and four rebounds to lead all scorers on either side.<\/p>\n
This isn’t the same Akins from the past three seasons.<\/p>\n
This is one of the predictions I’ve been hoping would come true all season but hasn’t yet. I think that changes on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Michigan State took a\u00a0huge<\/em> step in the right direction on Tuesday, making 7-of-20 shots from long range and I think they’re about ready to finally live up to their sharp-shooting billing. The Spartans have shooters but they just haven’t been taking open shots with confidence. That changed on Tuesday and will continue on Wednesday against North Carolina.<\/p>\n I see Michigan State shooting 10-for-20 from deep against North Carolina.<\/p>\n Down one with 20 seconds to go, Michigan State basketball will have a chance to beat North Carolina. Unfortunately, the play drawn up by Izzo during the timeout won’t go as planned and Michigan State will have to rush to get a shot up and it won’t fall, leading to a couple of North Carolina free throws on the other end and a missed buzzer-beater by the Spartans as they fall 73-70.<\/p>\n A tough loss for the Spartans, but something to learn from.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Bounce-back game?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":20010,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[187],"tags":[59,190,189,504],"class_list":["post-20009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-basketball","tag-featured","tag-michigan-state-basketball","tag-michigan-state-spartans","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20009","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=20009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20009\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}3. MSU has a chance to win on final possession<\/h3>\n