Maryland Game Recap (11/27/08)
Posted by kj on Thursday, November 27th, 2008
MSU falls hard to Maryland, 80-62, in roughly a 66-possession game. Unofficial box score.
Angst-ridden bullets:
- I once called Goran Suton “MSU’s most indispensable player.” I’m disappointed to now have a data point that backs up that claim.
- Raymar Morgan’s proclivity to pick up cheap fouls is apparently a chronic problem. Which gives me a sense of enormous dread about the rest of this season. In the shorter term, I suppose he should at least be well rested for tomorrow night’s game after only playing 14 minutes tonight.
- Travis Walton was obviously the singular reason MSU had any shot at winning this game: 16 points on 8-10 shooting. But that reach-in foul he picked up with seven seconds left on the shot clock with the scored tied at 43 felt like a real momentum changer. Walton had to go to the bench, and the Terrapins proceeded to go on a 23-6 run.
- When your top two inside scorers are both on the bench, having your best perimeter shooter struggle sure doesn’t help. Chris Allen: 5 points on 10 FG attempts, no three-point makes.
- Couldn’t ask for much more from Marquise Gray: 7 points, 4 rebounds, and 2 blocks in 17 minutes. A couple defensive lapses where he lost his man in the lane, though.
- I was surprised to see that MSU had 15+ offensive rebounds. But when you miss 33 FG attempts and 15 free throws, you’re bound to grab at least a few of those misses. And not many of those offensive rebounds turned into points.
- Maryland from 3-point range: 9-19. For a team that didn’t look like a good outside shooting team on paper, their shooting strokes sure looked good tonight.
- MSU from the free throw line: 12-27. When Allen missed two of three free throw shots late in the second half, you knew it was officially contagious.
- If you’re looking for a ray of hope, look at those last two sets of shooting stats again. Both pretty flukey.
- Another flukey stat: Idong Ibok was the only Spartan other than Kalin Lucas to have more than one assist. Somehow, he finished with three.
- As much as the team’s offense looked bad, the defense concerns me more. A lot of confusion making switches on picks that led to lay-ups or open three-point looks. MSU’s run to get back into the game late in the first half was fueled by their only stretch of solid man-to-man defense, which led to transition opportunities.
- I have to say that a record of 2-4 a week from now looks much more likely than a record of 4-2 does. The road to conference play looks very long and very treachorous at the moment.
In addition to severely damaging MSU’s credibility as a top ten team, this loss damages many of our basketball-viewing weekends. I don’t have immediate access to ESPNU and probably won’t go out of my way to find it. Game time is 8:00 tomorrow night against the Gonzaga-Oklahoma State loser. Fire up those radios, I guess.
Filed in game recap11 responses so far
11 Responses to “Maryland Game Recap (11/27/08)”
Dylan (umhoops.comon 27 Nov 2008 at 10:27 pm 1I’m really curious whether Maryland’s hot shooting was a fluke or whether this is the Maryland team my Wolverines will face next week.
kellaris88on 27 Nov 2008 at 11:57 pm 2Didn’t take long for the Spartans to prove how overrated they are this year. Hopefully Suton is back soon, because MSU doesn’t look like much without him. It should be painfully obvious who the true Big10 favorite is after Purdue handles Oklahoma and Duke this week.
Boiler up!
HCon 28 Nov 2008 at 12:20 am 3Really tough to swallow that free throw shooting statistic. 12-27 is symbolic of a team thinking that showing up for a game is equivalent to winning that game. Really disappointing.
Teams can lose games but missing free throw opportunities like that will turn Izzo’s hairline into Coach Heathcotes mighty fast.
Hopefully MSU will play a more complete game against Oklahoma State.
wife of a spartanon 28 Nov 2008 at 6:37 am 4Does anyone know why no Herzog? even for a minute or two.
Boy it starts with defense. Expect a lot of practice and hopefully
more respectable effort against NC, otherwise we could get trounced
similar to the Memphis game last year. You don’t want to need a wake up call, but if you do, this is it. defense, defense, defense
Spartalyticalon 28 Nov 2008 at 8:57 am 5I mostly watched last night’s game through my fingers. Travis Walton was a stud. Taking and hitting shots confidently, many times when the team was in real need of a bucket. I agree that his cheap reach in foul seemed to be a tide-changer. Even the manner in which it was committed — it looked like he was just frustrated and reached in to slap the guy.
I also agree that Gray looked generally good. Had a couple of good moves inside, boards and blocks. I really think they could go to him more inside when he’s got position established.
I didn’t expect Suton’s absence to hurt as much as it did last night, but that’s mostly credited to Raymar Morgan. That wasn’t hit on much in this posting, so I’ll gladly do it here. As was said, Morgan had a plateful of cheap fouls. But it was his reaction and attitude that infuriated me last night. He picks up three relatively quick in the first half and sits the bench. Picks up a fourth almost immediately in the second half, and sits again. He starts in with what’s turned into his typical whining and huffing about how it’s not his fault and how he’s trying, and rolling his eyes with what appeared to be sarcastic quips to Izzo (this was obvious well before the commentator after the game made the same observation) as he gets friggin’ screamed at on the bench. Now I would go so far to agree that a couple of those fouls were questionable, but all four were stupid positions for Raymar to put himself in. ALL of them. We saw that much of last year with ill-advised fouls and turnovers (especially walks). When you’ve got Suton out already, Morgan needs to put his big boy pants on so he can step in and take up some slack. Last night he looked nothing like a junior who’s started for his third straight year. He looked like an undisciplined baby. He’s got immense talent, but what good is it if he brings that kind of short-sighted play and attitude afterword? Izzo should keep him from starting tonight.
Maryland was playing solid and sharp all night, and out-hustled and out-worked the Spartans in every observable manner. As frustrating as the first half was to watch, Maryland was hitting some pretty crazy shots at times and EVERYTHING seemed to be falling. Much credit to them and their coach for having them ready to play. But outside of those amazing shots, it became apparent that State’s defense was horrible. Lapses everywhere, tons of easy buckets given up in addition to the tough ones. Missed screens, slow steps, it was awful to watch.
And what happened to running on offense? All the game commentators talked about before hand was MSU’s depth and athletic ability and desire to make this contest a track meet. Suton’s not critical to a running team, so his absence wasn’t a factor here. There were a couple of transitions where they pushed it up hard, but too many of those pushes essentially boiled down to blitzing up to the three-point line then stopping, wondering what to do. Aside from that, there were relatively few attempts to run even when the floor looked wide open and ripe for it.
The other thing I kept waiting for was Lucas to take the game over like he has in the past when no one else could be found. Never happened. He had a few nice moves he created to the basket, but this largely wasn’t the case and it he didn’t look to be making significant attempts most of the time. Allen got good looks but they just weren’t falling. I don’t find much fault that’s his.
In general, the effort just wasn’t there. It really really looked like the players (not Izzo — he knows much better) were looking past Maryland to Gonzaga. This one should have been easy, the players knew that, but once they figured out that wasn’t going to be the case, they were too far behind and out-of-sync to have a say in the result. What an embarrassing performance.
Moothekowon 28 Nov 2008 at 9:47 am 6Disappointing all around. Completely agree with the comments about Raymar pouting. If this team can’t win with him in foul trouble they’re in for a long year. I don’t see any reason to believe that Raymar won’t get into similar foul trouble in future games (seems like it happened fairly frequently last year as well). Anyone else notice it seemed like MSU hardly ever ran after loose balls? It seemed like multiple times an MSU defender would swat the ball away from a Maryland player… then the entire team would sit and watch the ball slowly roll around until a Maryland player ran after it and picked it up. Austin Thornton seemed like the only MSU player last night that really seemed to be hustling. Thought he was a bright spot last night – but it seems he’s just not talented enough to be able to handle the ball with a tenacious defender on him.
Also – while Walton’s shooting was a definite plus – I was quite disappointed that he still doesn’t seem to be able to inbound the ball without turning it over.
Mark in DCon 28 Nov 2008 at 10:22 am 7I like to wait and see what the tempo free stats say about a game before passing final judgement, but it was clear from watching that our perimeter defense was atrocious. Our post D wasn’t very good either, but I think that was partly due to getting burned from outside the arc. Once that starts happening the inside guys pay more attention to flying out on open perimeter players than they should, leaving them suseptible to backdoor cuts. Given that our back court, with the exception of Walton, is pretty young, I am very concerned whether we’ll improve in that area this year.
Given our injury situation down low, with Suton out and Roe still working himself back into shape, there’s hope that our interior D and rebounding can improve significantly. We are healthy on the perimeter right now though, so if our perimeter D is going to improve then the guys that played last night will have to step it up. Lets hope this game was an aberration and not a sign of things to come. I thought our offense, with the exception of free throw shooting, was OK – nothing to write home about but good enough to keep us in the game with a decent defensive effort. Unfortunately, such effort was not forthcoming.
Brett Schulteon 28 Nov 2008 at 11:07 am 8Sounds like Sparty has a Brian Randle on their hands in Morgan. Watching Randle pick up cheap foul after cheap foul was infuriating, and Illini fans hoped against hope he would figure things out as an upperclassman. He never did. I don’t understand how a guy can’t step back and figure out how to stop taking dumb fouls. Unfortunately, some guys just seem to be hard-wired that way.
SpartanDanon 28 Nov 2008 at 1:31 pm 9That was hideous. The free-throw shooting … wow. Despite all the wide-open looks Maryland got, despite Morgan and Suton spending all night glued to the bench (for different reasons), this would have been a very close game with our usual good free-throw shooting.
I hope this serves as a wake-up call, because this team is a lot better than they looked last night.
Ryanon 28 Nov 2008 at 9:54 pm 10No panicking! I seem to remember a certain National Champion losing to Wright State for no apparent reason. It would be nice if they didn’t lay a steaming turd, but one game, no matter how noxious, isn’t a season changer.
Spartans Weblog » MSU at the Old Spice Classic: A Statistical Reviewon 01 Dec 2008 at 12:23 pm 11[...] we should get too despondent about MSU’s Old Spice Classic results (although yours truly was pretty despondent late Thursday night). The Maryland loss was disappointing, but the team bounced back to play very [...]