http://www.basketballprospectu.....icleid=624

Incidentally, UConn scares me because they are a lot like MSU in that they play defense and are not afraid to go deep in the count. That said, a RedBulled-up Idong Ibok could could certainly give Thabeet fits for about 12 minutes and disrupt the entire UConn day.

The press was a non-factor. Louisville is a somewhat pedestrian team on offense and if they are not getting some fast break points off that press then they have trouble scoring against good half court defenses. Today our ball handling was superb thanks to Lucas, Walton, and Lucious. Lucious got into trouble picking up his dribble in no-man’s land once, but that that was his only real miscue. He made a timely three pointer to make up for it though and played well overall. Lucas was his normal great self. Walton seems to finally have gotten the turnover issue that plagued him his first couple of seasons under control and with his D and timely scoring has had a fantastic all around tournament.

Allen didn’t score much but he did a lot of little things like tracking down loose balls, rebounding, and helping break the press that don’t show up in the stats but are valuable. It would be great to see him start hitting his shots but as long as he’s making hustle plays he deserves some minutes – right now we seem to have plenty of scoring options. Summers had the hot hand today and played a good all-around game too with some rebounds and good D. Green continues to impress with his rebounding and timely scoring. He’s light years ahead of where I expected him to be at this point. I cannot believe we are in the Final Four again – Fantastic!

This win was easier than I ever thought it would be – Louisville just seemed to have no answer for our D. It seemed like they were expecting a repeat of the Arizona game and when that didn’t happen the fight just went out of them.

I’m not sure how much those L’ville fans slipped the refs at halftime, but the striped ones’ performance in the second half was atrocious. I don’t mind a crew that calls a tight game as long as it goes both ways, but they were allowed to reach in and bump our ballhandler coming up the court with no-calls all game, while we got every little bump called on us. Very one sided but their poor performance at the line and our depth made it a non-issue, thank goodness. The team has exceeded my expectations and punched their ticket to the championship weekend. They deserve to be listed up there with some of the other all time great Spartan teams.

Technically (I saw UNC and Duke fans going round and round on ESPN message boards about this): UNC was not the ACC champion. The ACC champion is the winner of the ACC tournment. The ACC does not award a “regular” season championship. So, in fact the Spartans are the last conference champion standing.

Not exactly ownership.

I do have one question, though: how much of both Morgan and Roe’s issues are physical and how much psychological? A lot of people have noted Morgan’s poor tourney. From what I understand about Mono, I assume he is physically still subpar. But what about Roe? He seems like half the player he was in february. Are there physical issues we don’t know about? Or has he hit some kind of freshman wall?

One of the truly amazing thing is that these last two victories have come despite getting basically no production from either player. That is just another dimension to Izzo’s amazing job this year. But, jeeze, I’d feel a lot better about MSU’s chances next weekend if I knew Morgan and Roe would show up.