Michigan State bounced from Big Ten tourney by Minnesota, 63-58
WASHINGTON – A momentary lull in the questions caused Tom Izzo to pry himself forward off the wall outside Michigan State’s locker room. He demanded more.
“You can’t let me off this easy,” Izzo demanded of the reporters circling him. “We sucked.”
It was a harsh, emotional assessment made in the moments after his Spartans got bounced from the Big Ten tournament with a 63-58 loss to No. 4 seed Minnesota on Friday at Verizon Center.
Sure, the game – which featured nine ties and 11 lead changes – was close all afternoon. Yes, MSU beat Minnesota on the boards and kept the turnovers to a minimum.
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That was all on paper. The Spartans struggled to hit shots, looked lost on defensive assignments and failed to limit the Gophers’ damage in the paint. Their step-too-slow effort left both players and their Hall of Fame coach perplexed.
It also meant an early exit from the Big Ten tournament for the first time in four years. The fifth-seeded Spartans had played in the last three championship games, winning two.
“We just didn’t come ready to play. That was it,” freshman Miles Bridges, who scored a game-high 20 points but made just 7 of 20 shots and 2 of 11 3-point attempts. “We’re trying to go for a championship, and we can’t come out to play? That really surprised me.”
MSU (19-14) heads back to East Lansing to wait for the NCAA tournament selection show to find out if and where it might play next. The Spartans have played in 19 consecutive NCAA tournaments under Izzo, and bracket analysts believe they will be in the 68-team field when it’s announced Sunday (5:30 p.m./CBS).
That wasn’t foremost on Izzo’s mind, however, as he assessed what led to the dropoff from Thursday’s near-complete performance in a win over Penn State to a subpar offensive and defensive effort 24 hours later.
“I felt like my team and me, myself, didn’t do a very good job of handling that,” Izzo said. “If it doesn’t hurt, if it doesn’t bother them, if they want to forget it today or tomorrow, I’m not gonna. I’m not gonna. I did not like the way we played, and I did not like the way we competed today.
“And I don’t think it’s because they didn’t wanna. I just don’t think they understand yet that it’s a different season. And if we get into the next one, it’s an even more different season.”
It was a Big Ten slugfest with a thumping cadence and flow. After MSU went ahead for the final time on Matt McQuaid’s 3-pointer with 5:39 to play, the Gophers pulled away with a 10-2 run over a four-minute stretch, eight of them coming from Jordan Murphy and Reggie Lynch off their work deep in the paint.
Minnesota shot 41 percent and owned a 32-24 edge in the paint. Lynch, a 6-foot-10 junior center, scored 16 points on 6 of 7 shooting in 35 minutes. He was a combined 2-for-7 for five points over just 28 minutes in the two regular-season meetings while fouling out of both MSU wins.
“We let him get good position,” senior guard Alvin Ellis said. “We didn’t do the small things that we needed to do that we talked about. We didn’t keep him out of the paint, and he got easy buckets.”
Murphy finished with 10 points and 13 rebounds, while freshman Amir Coffey scored 13 for Minnesota.
Tum Tum Nairn’s 3-pointer with 6.0 seconds left cut Minnesota’s lead to three, but Nate Mason made two free throws and Bridges’ final 3-point attempt clanged off the rim.
MSU defeated the Gophers both times they played during the regular season, a 75-74 overtime win to open Big Ten play on Dec. 27 and a 65-47 home win on Jan. 11. Minnesota (24-8) plays No. 8 seed Michigan at 1 p.m. Saturday in the conference semifinals. The Wolverines upset top-seeded Purdue in overtime, 74-70.
Freshman Nick Ward finished with 15 points and 11 rebounds for the Spartans. No other MSU player reached double figures.
The Spartans are projected to be a 10-seed by ESPN’s Joe Lunardi, while CBS’s Jerry Palm has them as a 9-seed but still on his bubble watch.
“We lost a couple games we could’ve-should’ve won. And now, we’re out of this tournament in a game we not should’ve won but could’ve won,” Izzo said. “That’s what I told them the bottom line is. How long should it hurt? It should hurt until we play again. And if somebody thinks that’s cruel, I’m sorry, man, that they’ve never played in championship events. Because you can’t do that.”
Contact Chris Solari:csolari@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter@chrissolari.