GREEN & WHITE BASKETBALL

Michigan State basketball: Tom Izzo stresses improving concentration

Lansing State Journal

Michigan State Spartans guard Joshua Langford (1) goes to the basket against Rutgers during the second half at Louis Brown Athletic Center.

EAST LANSING – Now that those two pesky early Big Ten games are out of the way, it’s time for No. 3 Michigan State to focus on something bigger.

Itself.

“We gotta worry about our opponent and know what they’re doing,” coach Tom Izzo said after the Spartans’ practice Thursday, “but we gotta start worrying about us. We gotta get sharper on the things we worked on tonight, the set-ups, the screening, coming off them.

“Michigan State has gotta get better. And if Michigan State gets better, I like our chances against some of these teams.”

The first of a six-game stretch this month to close the non-conference portion of MSU’s schedule comes Saturday against Southern Utah (6 p.m./Big Ten Network). Five of those games will be at Breslin Center, with only Dec. 16's game against Oakland — at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit — coming away from home.

And coming off Tuesday’s 62-52 survival at Rutgers, MSU (8-1, 2-0 Big Ten) knows there is plenty to work on in the coming month.

“Just to get better and more aggressive,” sophomore Miles Bridges said. “Rutgers killed us on the offensive glass, so we gotta get better at that. Our defense, we had a lot of miscommunications. So I don’t know — we have a lot to get better at. There’s no perfect team out there. There’s been a lot of upsets. And we don’t want that to happen to us.

“That’s the beauty in basketball. You can never be perfect. So we’re just gonna try to continue to get better every day and stay focused.”

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Izzo is acutely aware of the dropoff in competition from November — when the Spartans played three top-10 teams — and Big Ten-opening wins in the past week against Nebraska and Rutgers. MSU spent time on the road in Chicago, Portland and New Jersey.

Now comes a chance for some recalibration and fine-tuning. After Saturday, the Spartans get the week off before the Oakland game during finals. They’ll host Houston Baptist and Long Beach State before Christmas, then Cleveland State and Savannah State as 2018 approaches.

Izzo’s primary concern is making sure his team maintains its concentration on basketball with everything else going on outside of the program. He added that he wants “to make sure that when we lose, it’s because we get beat, not because we lose concentration.”

“Jud Heathcote, rest his soul, always used to tell me that it’s the finals and Christmastime that are the hardest,” Izzo said. “Who wants to take finals? None of you guys did, I didn’t. And Christmas, who wants to be up here and practicing when everybody else is home? So those are the two times that I think are the most difficult as far as keeping guys focused in that way.

“Now if you’re winning and you’re doing well and there’s everybody around, sometimes those times are hard to focus in on, because everybody’s yapping at you – I mean students and everybody else. The one thing I will say with this group is there is experiences you think on handling those kind of things. … This group has still got a lot to learn and a lot to realize how to handle some of these things. And so do I.”

Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @chrissolari.