His big men were one of Tom Izzo’s concerns back in October. “They have to get better,” the Michigan State coach said. “By committee, I have enough of them. I have quantity bigs. Now we have to turn that into quality bigs.”
By late November, after 6-foot-10-inch Goran Suton had gone for 16 points and 12 rebounds in the Spartans’ rout of North Carolina State, that concern had abated a bit.
“Everybody who’s a Spartan fan has been waiting for that,” Izzo said. “There’s no secret about that. The guy has very good skills, and he’s starting to shoot the ball with more confidence. But if you asked him, I think he’d tell you he’s spending more time on his game too.
“Goran Suton has a chance to be a very, very good player. It’s just a matter of him putting more into it. That’s what I tell him every day. He’s a great guy, and yet we need him a little nastier, a little tougher and maybe [with] a little more ambition to do well.”
Now it is almost January, and several numbers scream out at us. Suton, who averaged just 4.9 rebounds a game in his first two seasons in East Lansing, is averaging 8.2, fifth-best in the Big Ten. Another of Izzo’s big men, 6-7 Raymar Morgan, is eighth in the conference at 7.1. As a team, the Spartans’ rebounding margin is 9.8 per game, third in the conference behind Indiana’s 10.7 and Wisconsin’s 10.2.
This does not mean that Izzo’s concern is totally allayed. Like all coaches, he can always find the cloud camouflaged by the silver lining. But with the Big Ten season set to open Wednesday night, the performances of his big men have been impressive enough for us to predict again that his Spartans will win the league championship.
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The conference is awash with gaudy records. Only one team, Michigan, hovers below .500. Michigan State and Indiana have just one loss, and Wisconsin and Minnesota have been beaten only twice.
The Gophers, who have put up their wins against overmatched competition, are hardly as good as they appear. But that cannot be said of the Spartans, the Hoosiers or the Badgers, who have proven themselves the class of the conference.
If there is a surprise, and it is just a small one, it is the emergence of Wisconsin, which has lost only to Duke and Marquette and enters league play coming off a big win Saturday at No. 9 Texas. It was the Badgers’ first road victory over a Top 10 team since January 1980, and they managed it even without injured point guard Trevon Hughes, who sat out with a boot on the ankle he sprained in Friday’s practice.
They were expected to struggle after losing Alando Tucker and Kammron Taylor, who for two years had been their scoring and spiritual leaders. Yet they are again proving the effectiveness of the system run by wily old coach Bo Ryan, who always manages to insert his team into the championship mix.
The Hoosiers, in contrast, were always expected to be in that mix, and the only thing surprising about them has been the performance of freshman guard Eric Gordon. He arrived with hype and has lived up to it, even while operating in an understated manner.
Just the opposite has been true of the freshman group at Ohio State, which struggled early to escape the legacy left by Greg Oden and Mike Conley Jr. The Buckeyes claim they have emerged from those shadows and are intent on establishing their own identity. But, for one example, the nature of that identity is still so fuzzy that they depend primarily on a zone defense, which coach Thad Matta really doesn’t like to play.
There is no mistaking the identity of the league’s bottom-feeders. Iowa and Michigan are adapting to new coaches, and Northwestern has trouble rebounding. But even more than in Columbus, there is still no clear picture of what to expect from Illinois (a loss to Tennessee State?) or Penn State (just what does a victory over Denver really mean?).
That leaves Purdue, which starts two sophomores and three freshmen. That is a potentially combustible mix that could implode in conference competition. But the Boilermakers play hard and understand that defense is important.
They will not challenge for the championship. But don’t be shocked if, sometime this winter, youth is served in a most surprising way.
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