It was really just a play that Wisconsin fans have grown accustomed to seeing throughout the Badgers’ 13-game conference home win streak. The exact same alley-oop that has electrified the Kohl Center since Alando Tucker cracked the starting lineup last November.
It was the exclamation point on UW’s biggest win of the season and a final volt of electricity for the 17, 142 fans that trudged through hell and high waters to see their local hoops team convincingly dismantle the preseason Big Ten favorite. It certainly wasn’t necessary, but nonetheless, it was entertaining for those in attendance.
Not so enthused by Devin Harris’ and Tucker’s antics, however, was Michigan State head coach Tom Izzo — the man who attempted to end the game with class, and the man who was visibly irritated following the final buzzer.
“I’ll remember that,” Izzo lamented as he shook Bo Ryan’s hand while leaving the court. He went on to partially vent his displeasure in the post-game news conference noting that he would “never allow that [to] happen with players,” before restraining himself from completely expressing his disgust towards the incident.
Izzo was clearly upset about the play. In fact he was probably upset about his entire trip to Madison. Before he arrived, things were looking pretty swell in East Lansing. After sputtering out of the conference gates early in the Big Ten season, his Spartans had finally strung together a three-game win streak. They had beaten Illinois at home and won on the road at Indiana. At the time, both of those teams were ranked.
Michigan State had catapulted themselves to the better side of .500 in the Big Ten and a win Wednesday would have landed them a spot in the upper tier of the conference.
A team with a world of expectations heaved onto their shoulders at the beginning of the year would have retained at least a fraction of their legitimacy in front of a national audience on ESPN.
An invitation to the NCAA tournament in March would have nearly been a guarantee for the team that closes out its season with five of their final seven games at home.
Instead, Izzo and the Spartans — a program that is only two years removed from three consecutive Final Fours — now find themselves drifting towards the lower end of the NCAA bubble and creeping closer and closer to the confines of postseason purgatory in the NIT.
Michigan State has dug itself a hole extremely similar to the one they were stuck in last season before rallying to win their last five games of the season en route to a No. 10 seed and first round exit in the NCAA tournament.
Life certainly is frustrating for Izzo right now. Despite a recruiting hand that rivals that of Duke and North Carolina, his program is clearly a step down from where it was two years ago.
Chris Hill might just be the only deep talent that MSU throws at an opposing team. Although highly touted Kelvin Torbert is athletic, he is far from the all-American he was once projected to be.
Senior Aloysious Anagonye and Adam Ballinger have been a couple of duds 10 games into the Big Ten schedule, and the constant shuffling of the starting lineup has prevented any other players from consistently finding a rhythm.
On top of all of this, Izzo has lost the only meeting between Michigan State and Wisconsin for the second consecutive season. Until last year’s 64-63 upset at Breslin Arena, the Spartans had won 12 of their last 13 against the Badgers.
Now they’re forced to sit back and watch the Badgers ascend above them in the Big Ten standings for another season.
Wisconsin appears to be heading in a different direction than the struggling Spartans. Tuesday night’s win put them within striking distance of a second consecutive Big Ten title and in the driver’s seat of a sure NCAA bid.
And they’ve done this simply by winning the games they’re supposed to win. Four of their losses have come against ranked teams and the fifth came on the road at Michigan. They’ve taken care of all of their home games and won the road games against the Big Ten’s lower-tiered teams — which is simply the recipe for success in the most underrated and under-appreciated conference in the nation.
Michigan State, on the other hand, has had home losses to the likes of Villanova, Toledo and the overachieving Iowa Hawkeyes. Couple these past problems with the fact that MSU still has three games against ranked teams on the horizon and one can easily understand the gallons of Maalox that Izzo has been guzzling since the beginning of the season.
By no means has the sun set on the Michigan State basketball program. They’re still an above average team. But Izzo and the Spartans have certainly seen better days than the ones they’ve endured the last two seasons.
Izzo and his boys are backed into the corner once again. They just watched one of their newfound rivals soar past them, not only in an important game, but also quite possibly in national prestige. And that ally-oop at the end of Tuesday night’s game was like throwing salt in Izzo’s already burning wounds.
