EAST LANSING – In quieter moments, Jase Richardson and Coen Carr enjoy building Lego sets together at their apartment. A calming way, both have said, to decompress from the grueling grind physically and hyperfocus needed mentally to play elite-level college basketball.
Because playing for Tom Izzo can be intense and demanding. From both the coach and their Michigan State teammates. Even between the two roommates.
Case in point: A bad-pass turnover near midcourt at Iowa less than two weeks ago.
Richardson’s handoff outside got stripped away from Carr, and the freshman committed a foul seconds later. He got on his close friend, a sophomore, and Carr gave it right back to Richardson. It was a brief but important interaction of open communication to get back on the same page.
“We both want to win, and we know that it’s nothing personal,” Carr reflected after practice Tuesday. “Nobody’s coming at anybody disrespectful or in any kind of way. We just want to win, and that’s it. And you just have to be open to listen and hear them out and not really listen to how they’re saying it and listen to what they’re saying.”
That interaction proved to be a small but significant building block of a 33-6 run that led to the Spartans’ eventual 91-84 victory to clinch the outright Big Ten title.
“Those two are tighter than thieves,” Izzo said Tuesday. “But, yeah, there should be a time when somebody should be able to post somebody else up.”
Watch Michigan State’s March Madness game vs. Bryant on Sling
Those subtle nuances in communication show the type of “connectiveness” Izzo pointed to as No. 7 MSU (27-6) prepares to open NCAA tournament play Friday in Cleveland as the 2-seed in the South region against 15-seed Bryant (23-11). Tipoff is 10 p.m. at Rocket Arena (TBS).
It also is a reason that, when Izzo recently spoke to Houston coach Kelvin Sampson, the former Jud Heathcote assistant and Indiana head coach, he praised what he has seen from the Spartans throughout the season from afar.
“The first thing he said was, ‘I love the way your team’s connected,’” Izzo said. “Well, how in the hell do you see that on TV? It must be better than even I think.”
It also isn’t necessarily a quantifiable metric for the KenPom/BartTorvik crowd to measure. It is the type of bonding that began with MSU’s 10-day trip to Spain and three games there, developing chemistry and learning each other’s game – particularly the newcomers Richardson and transfers Frankie Fidler and Szymon Zapala. It got further forged on the trip to the Upper Peninsula for Izzo’s jersey retirement and an exhibition game at Northern Michigan, then sharpened early in the season.
“I think the most effective teams really have a clear line of communication – not with their coach, but with each other,” junior forward Jaxon Kohler said after practice Tuesday. “Because if you have teammates that are always disagreeing with each other or never listening to each other, that’s not really a team. A team is where everyone can come together (as) a single unit. And a lot of that, coach is encouraging us to do in practice. But we also kind of look to each other for that.”
Izzo said it was around the three games in three days at the Maui Classic, where MSU beat Colorado and North Carolina (in overtime) sandwiched between a loss to Memphis. The Spartans rode that rhythm to 13 straight wins to establish themselves as Big Ten title contenders and a top-10 team, then finished their quest for Izzo’s record-tying 11th regular-season league title with seven more consecutive wins over Quad 1 opponents and an eighth in a row over Oregon in the Big Ten tournament quarterfinals.
TOM IZZO: Michigan State basketball must maintain focus to make March Madness magical
“There’s always two sides to what they see on the court, so you gotta hear each other out before you can get upset at somebody,” Richardson said. “Sometimes they see something that you don’t see and you don’t see something that they don’t see, so it’s really that you gotta trust the guy next to you. …
“I think it’s just a lot of trust, honestly. I feel like I trust a lot on these guys, and they’re gonna tell me the right thing and they’re gonna put me in a position to be successful. So to be able to hear it for them, I know they’re just trying to make me better.”
That back-and-forth, give-and-take friction has defined Izzo’s program over the decades.
Back to Mateen Cleaves shoving Morris Peterson into a locker room at the Palace of Auburn Hills during the Sweet 16 in 2000, challenging his boyhood friend from Flint and exhorting the forward to score 16 of his 21 points in a furious second-half comeback against Syracuse. Two weeks later, they were celebrating a national title in Indianapolis.
Or in 2019, when Izzo and freshman Aaron Henry famously got into a heated conversation on the bench during a timeout in Des Moines, Iowa. TV cameras caught the confrontation and it blew up in a social media world that didn’t exist 19 years earlier. It barely registered as anything out of the norm for Henry in the locker room until national reporters swarmed and surrounded him, but those Spartans would go on to the Final Four – Izzo’s most recent of eight trips.
Izzo also made it clear that no one is beyond reproach. He didn’t get into specifics, but he said he was “posted up in a huddle by fiery junior guard Tre Holloman one time” during this season.
“And he had a good point in what he brought up, and I used that,” Izzo recalled Tuesday. “I won’t get into it, because that was a huddle – that was the sanctuary of where we are – but everybody goes through those times. And if you respect the people you’re playing with, you love the people you’re playing with, you should be able to argue or communicate.
“Everybody takes it different. If people see two people arguing, everybody thinks they hate each other. My God, Draymond (Green) and I would have never made it through a day. It’s just the way it is. But if people are passionate about what they want to accomplish and they’re trying to hold everybody accountable, that stuff happens. And I think that the connectiveness of our team has helped that.”
Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him @chrissolari.
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Next up: Bulldogs
Matchup: No. 2-seed Michigan State (27-6) vs. 15-seed Bryant (23-11), NCAA tournament first round, South region.
Tipoff: 10 p.m. Friday; Rocket Arena, Cleveland.
TV/radio: TBS; WJR-AM (760).
At stake: Winner will face winner of Marquette-New Mexico on Sunday for Sweet 16 berth.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan State basketball’s connectivity a key for March Madness
