" title="Spartans Weblog">Spartans Weblog

The Spartans stick it to the Badgers 60-51 in a 59-possessions game.  StatSheet box score.
Let’s start with what still worries me after this game: Three-point shooting.  MSU made just 2 of 9 attempts from beyond the arc, with both makes coming in the final minutes of the game.  That’s our fourth straight game with 3 [...]

MSU in games in which Goran Suton or Raymar Morgan have been out/limited:

8-4 record
Offensive efficiency of 105.0
Defensive efficiency of 96.3

MSU in games in which Goran Suton and Raymar Morgan have both been at/near full strength:

12-0 record
Offensive efficiency of 118.4
Defensive efficiency of 93.8

The schedule for the second set of games is slightly easier (4-5 pushovers vs. [...]

Rankings Update

AP: #13 (down from #9)
Coaches: #14 (down from #9)
Sagarin: #11 (down from #8)
Kenpom: #21 (steady from last week)
RPI: #5 (steady from last week)
Bracketology: #3 seed (down from #3 seed)
Crashing the Dance: #3 seed

Purdue is ranked one spot ahead of us in both the human polls, reflecting that we’re now basically back to being dead [...]

MSU accelerates past Ohio State 78-67 in a 60-possession game.  Statsheet box score.
This was, of course, a tale of two halves.
The tale of the first half was Durrell Summers single-handedly keeping the team afloat, scoring 16 of the team’s 26 points as the rest of the team struggled with turnovers and 3-point shooting against the [...]

The Wildcats stun the Spartans 70-63 in a 63-possession game.  StatSheet box score.
The Spartan fan half of my brain is pretty mad about this one.  We lost to Northwestern, of all teams, to end a 28-game home court winning streak and ruin a perfect conference record.  And we did it by completely losing our composure [...]

Following up on yesterday’s attempt to invent a statistic, here are the current Points Over Replacement Per Adjusted Game (PORPAG) numbers for the MSU players listed at Kenpom:

Player
Min%
OffRtg
%Poss
PORPAG

Lucas
76.0
121.3
23.0
3.90

Morgan
67.3
112.7
25.6
2.88

Allen
49.8
108.9
24.0
1.70

Suton
35.5
123.6
17.4
1.47

Summers
50.2
104.6
20.0
1.15

Walton
68.8
98.1
15.3
0.76

Roe
41.7
99.3
20.0
0.67

Green
21.7
110.6
15.2
0.51

Gray
33.0
99.5
18.6
0.50

Thornton
10.8
109.9
17.6
0.28

Lucious
20.7
91.0
24.8
0.13

Ibok
16.8
78.1
8.8
-0.09

TOTAL
13.86

Michigan State’s current (raw) offensive efficiency figure is 112.0.  So in a 65-possession game, they’d be expected to score 72.8 points.  A [...]

Rankings Update

AP: #7 (steady from last week)
Coaches: #7 (up from #10)
Sagarin: #8 (up from #10)
Kenpom: #18 (up from #23)
RPI: #3 (up from#4)
Bracketology: #2 seed (up from #3 seed)

The human voters now agree that we’re the best two-loss, non-UNC team in the country.  Sagarin basically agrees (with one-loss Clemson ranked a spot ahead of us there) [...]