EAST LANSING — Tom Izzo’s short wishlist for March — beyond the obvious banner-worthy accomplishments — is for Michigan State basketball to start shooting 3-pointers better.
Just not at the expense of the job the Spartans have done defending the arc.
“I’d like to do both ,” Izzo said Tuesday, “I’d like to defend it and score it.”
“Other than that,” he added about his satisfaction level during his team’s five-game win streak, “I’ve been pretty cool.”
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With two games left and a chance to claim at least his fourth outright Big Ten title (after locking up his 11th overall title with Michigan’s loss on Wednesday), Izzo experienced flashbacks to the last time No. 7 MSU visited Iowa. That trip, however, wasn’t cool. Not in the least.
And it shaped how the Spartans (24-5, 15-3) are approaching Thursday’s game (8 p.m., FS1) with a championship on the line at Carver-Hawkeye Arena, even though the Hawkeyes (15-14, 6-12) sit near the bottom of the Big Ten.
“I think for us right now, the attention to detail is probably at an all-time high,” junior center Carson Cooper said after practice Tuesday. “Especially Iowa, you can’t look past them even though they’re not playing great basketball right now, because of what they’ve been able to do with us the last couple years. It really makes it personal for us”
On Feb. 25, 2023, the Spartans saw exactly what can happen when the Hawkeyes heat up from outside. And it is one of the big reasons Izzo and his players have taken a cautionary approach.
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With 4:40 to play in regulation, Joey Hauser hit MSU’s 11th 3-pointer in its 16th and final attempt of the game, giving MSU an eight-point lead. The Spartans would extend their lead to 13 with 1:34 to play.
That’s when the near-impossible happened, even though Izzo knew Iowa could catch fire in a flash (despite entering 6-for-52 from 3-point range in their previous two games).
Payton Sandfort and his teammates sent the game to overtime by draining six 3s in the last 90 seconds of regulation as MSU shot nothing but free throws. Iowa went on to a 112-106 win — just the fourth time in Division I history that a team lost when leading by at least 11 points with 55 seconds to play in regulation.
Afterward, Izzo called it “piss-poor coaching.” Reflecting on it Tuesday, he joked that “I just started sleeping over that one, like back in November.”
“If we get an 11-point lead (with a minute left),” he said, “I think we have a good chance to win this time, from the experience I had from the other time.”
But getting to 11 3-pointers would be a major accomplishment for this MSU team. The Spartans this season have hit that many just once, in the Big Ten opener Dec. 4 at Minnesota. Their high, aside from that game? Nine, as they rank 339th (out of 355 Division I teams) at 5.7 made 3s per game and 342nd at just 29.7% beyond the arc — and that’s with a recent surge, at 34.8% made over the past five games.
MSU has offset that slump by emerging as the Big Ten’s stingiest at guarding the arc, ranking fourth in the country in holding opponents to just 28.2% from deep.
“Just our defensive principles, we try to pride ourselves on defense,” said Jaden Akins, an emerging candidate for Big Ten defensive player of the year. “And that comes along with 3-point defense.”
Iowa ranks 29th nationally — and second in the Big Ten — at 37.6% from beyond the arc. Sandfort, who torched MSU for six 3s in that 2023 upset, leads the league with 213 3s. He and Josh Dix are among the nation’s top 260 players in made 3s per game, combining for more than 4.5 of their team’s 9.7 made per game.
“They’re lethal,” Izzo said of Sandfort and Dix.
Akins’ offensive struggles have been well chronicled. A 38.4% 3-point shooter entering the season, the senior guard is making a career-worst 29.4% of his attempts this winter. And that’s after going 4-for-9 in Sunday’s 71-62 win over Wisconsin.
“I’m just trying to shoot the ball with confidence,” Akins said. “Don’t aim the ball, just shoot it and shoot it with arc and then give it a better chance to go in.”
Izzo said he doesn’t want to be “selfish” and hopes this group can finish the final month by making closer to the 35-40% of 3s his teams usually average. “I would just take the low end of that,” he said, “and I think we’d be a much better team.”
Akins is a key to that, Izzo believes.
“We feel there’s a few things that he had a tweak,” he said. “But I pray to God he keeps shooting it well — for us, but way more for him.”
If the Spartans can do that, particularly at Iowa, they could be returning home as outright Big Ten champs.
“I’m not making it a bigger deal or a smaller deal. I’m making it: this is why you came here, this is what we do here.” Izzo said. “We don’t hang things (for) records, we hang things (for) championships.”
Chris Solari’s prediction for Michigan State at Iowa
Fighting to not be left out of the 15-team postseason league tournament, the Hawkeyes start strong and ride the senior night wave and coach Fran McCaffery’s urging. But MSU remains resilient on the road, starts hitting shots in the favorable gym and wearing down Iowa in transition, and delivers another outright Big Ten regular-season title for Izzo. The pick: MSU 84, Iowa 75.
Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him @chrissolari.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan State basketball: Making 3s, defending arc key to win at Iowa
