Michigan State basketball went from seamless to sloppy in L.A.: How do they fix it?

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LOS ANGELES — Somewhere in the City of Angels, more than 50 years ago, John Lennon took up a brief residency and forgot who he was for a while.

Call Michigan State basketball’s first Big Ten Los Angeles sojourn its own Lost Weekend. Tom Izzo just hopes the Spartans can get back to where they once belonged.

Their 13-game win streak came crashing to a halt at USC. They lost back-to-back games for the first time this season.

Their offense went from seamless and smooth to wonky and wretched. A previously breakneck fast-break looked broken.

And Tuesday night’s 63-61 loss at UCLA knocked them out of sitting alone atop the Big Ten standings after opening conference play with nine straight wins.

“We just gotta continue to stay aggressive and not let this just deter us into the next game. … And also, we can’t just play scared now,” junior center Carson Cooper said outside the locker room at Pauley Pavillion before a redeye flight home. “If things haven’t gone right, we can’t just fall back when adversity hits. We hit adversity twice in a couple of days, so now we really have to self-evaluate and look at ourselves and see what we can do.”

No. 9 MSU (18-4, 9-2 Big Ten) likely will end its three-week run in the top 10 of the USA TODAY Sports Coaches Poll when the new rankings come out Monday. Before then, the Spartans will host Oregon on Saturday (noon, Fox) as the second-place team in the league race for the first time.

No. 7 Purdue, which won at Iowa earlier Tuesday, overtook first place by a half-game. With the loss to UCLA, MSU is now tied for second with No. 22 Michigan, which defeated the Ducks on Wednesday.

After a seemingly infallible two-month stretch in which they mostly played high-level, precision basketball, the Spartans’ warts got exposed between the loss to UCLA and Saturday’s 70-64 loss at USC.

“We probably looked a little bit dysfunctional,” said MSU coach Tom Izzo, whose quest to pass Bob Knight as the Big Ten’s winningest coach in league play…

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/michigan-state-basketball-went-seamless-125035707.html

Author : Lansing State Journal

Publish date : 2025-02-06 12:50:00

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