Michigan State basketball<\/a> was able to put together their first back to back wins on the young season. The Spartans looked great on Friday against a decent Butler team, and looked even better in their second win of the weekend against Alcorn State. <\/span><\/p>\nAfter going down in the very beginning 5-3, Michigan State opened the floodgates and ripped off a 21-3 run. Finishing the first half on a 39-8 streak, Michigan State never truly felt the pressure from the Alcorn State Braves. Thanks to all scholarship players scoring five points or more, the Spartans cruised to an 81-49 victory over a good SWAC opponent.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThere were definitely some great things coming from the win at the Breslin, but also a few that will need to be cleaned up going into the holiday week. <\/span><\/p>\nLet\u2019s go over the good, great, bad, and ugly from Michigan State\u2019s Sunday evening victory.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nGood: Play from mix of freshman and veterans<\/h3>\n
MSU got off to a hot start. The Spartans found themselves up by almost 20 with 10 minutes remaining in the first half. Because of this, Izzo was able to use the game as an experimental, training matchup for most of the remaining time. This season we have seen almost all freshman lineups, mostly due to the veterans underperforming so Izzo pulled them. All freshman lineups can often be stagnant and extremely ineffective thanks simply to their lack of experience at this next level. Bad habits can be formed during these situations, so they are definitely not ideal.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nOn Sunday evening, however, Michigan State was able to look to their young guys early thanks to great performances and the large lead put together by the starters. This allowed Tom to begin mixing in the freshman with the veterans. Allowing them to play together gives the veterans a challenge to get the new guys involved, but also does exactly that. It gets the new guys involved as the veteran juniors and seniors facilitate. Slowly being able to rotate Coen Carr, Jeremy Fears, and Xavier Booker through the lineup while AJ Hoggard, Malik Hall, and Jaden Akins guide them on the court is a great way to develop your young players. <\/span><\/p>\nGreat: Tre Holloman<\/h3>\n
All of Spartan Nation was surprised when Tyson Walker was announced to be out against Alcorn State on Sunday night. Walker is Michigan State\u2019s leading scorer with 23 points per game and to be not available for what some were calling a <\/span>trap game, <\/span><\/i>there was slight reason for concern. Pretty quickly, however, Tre Holloman put those concerns to rest. For a while to start this season, Holloman was the only Spartan to have hit a 3-pointer. Izzo has said again and again how Tre not only impressed him and the staff last year, but has continued to improve this season. He did exactly that against the Alcorn State Braves.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nTre opened the night cool, calm, and collected. But most impressive was his offensive shooting. Shooting a perfect 5-for-5 from deep was nothing short of stunning. His shot was smooth and confident each time he put it up. In addition to leading the team in scoring, Holloman was tied with the team-high for both steals, two, and assists, five.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAfter getting his first career start, Holloman impressed just about everyone. It\u2019s apparent that he has been working on his offensive game tirelessly through the offseason and it\u2019s paying off. Tre leads the team from three, with a scorching 53.8%. Obviously, Tre will never unseat Tyson Walker for the starting shooting guard position. But knowing that he can be a legit offensive deep threat off the bench, and\/or be an option if Akins or Walker are out in the future is a great option.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0Bad: Field goal droughts<\/h3>\n
Even with Michigan State basketball starting the game so hot, the Spartans were not immune to a common foe, field goal droughts. <\/span><\/p>\nAfter building a substantial lead, even being up by 30 points at times, MSU suddenly began to struggle from the field. With 6:28 left in the first half, Jeremy Fears hit a jumper, assisted by Holloman. Believe it or not, this proved to be the final field goal of the half for Michigan State. For the next 6.5 minutes, the Spartans would miss their next five shots, not scoring again from the field in the first half. Thankfully for MSU, they had built their 30-point lead to help cushion this small cold streak. And, while there was no scoring from the field for MSU, they were able to get to the line a few times in this stretch. Michigan State went 4-for-6 from the line. Still, not great to finish the final 6:28 in a half with four points.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAgainst a Big Ten opponent, it\u2019s not likely the Spartans will be up by 30. Without having such a lead built up, field goal droughts can shift a game tremendously. Michigan State have found itself on the losing side of many of those droughts.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0Ugly: Rebounding<\/h3>\n
In addition to the field goal drought, MSU also struggled rebounding the basketball. Fortunately for the Spartans, however, neither affected the outcome. MSU was out-rebounded by Alcorn State, 41-38. Michigan State is a bigger and better team than the Braves. There is zero reason that the Spartans should be out-rebounded by their SWAC opponent. Alcorn State has just one player standing over 6-foor-8, and yet, they had six more offensive rebounds than MSU.<\/span><\/p>\n Against a Big Ten opponent, or Arizona later this week, providing that many second chance opportunities will be detrimental for Michigan State. The Spartan bigs cannot be out worked as they were Sunday night. <\/span><\/p>\nSomething tells me Izzo will focus his practices this week around that.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cBut the real concern is the rebounding. We get out-rebounded, they have 16 offensive (rebounds). You can look at it two ways. My staff tried be to, well, God, they missed a lot of shots, they had a lot of opportunities for offensive rebounds. I said, yeah, we had a lot of opportunities for defensive rebounds. So it just depends which way you want to look at it. I want to look at it my way. They can look at it whatever the hell way they want, but my way is gonna be the one that matters in the meetings tomorrow. So that\u2019s a concern.\u201d – <\/span>Izzo on being out-rebounded.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThis can’t happen moving forward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What was good, great, bad, and ugly on Sunday night?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":8992,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[187],"tags":[59,190,189,504,298],"class_list":["post-8959","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","tag-tre-holloman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8959","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\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8959\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}