2017-18 Michigan State: The Children Shall Lead Them
This edition of the Spartans featured freshmen and sophomores prominently, but continued the tradition of very strong regular seasons.
This is the first in a 3 part series about 2017-18 Michigan State. Part 2 will be released on Monday, December 7.
There is an Irish proverb, “Praise youth and it will prosper”. Some college basketball coaches believe in putting their top young players in key positions, building their confidence, and living through the mistakes. Other coaches believe in making their young players earn their roles, favoring more established upperclassmen. Both approaches can work and are really a matter of personal preference and style.
Tom Izzo has clearly preferred the later approach. His best teams have featured juniors and seniors who had paid their dues, complemented by younger phenoms. The 2017-18 edition of the Spartans was an aberration. For the first (and thus far only) time under Izzo, his team’s top 5 scorers were all freshmen or sophomores. A 6th freshman joined them as the top 6 in points per 40 minutes. Of 175 starts over 35 games, 170 were made by freshmen or sophomores.
The results were excellent, even by Michigan State’s lofty standards. A 30-5 record. 16-2 in conference, with a Big Ten regular season title. Postseason achievements were lacking, however. A second round conference tournament loss to their rivals was followed by a second round upset at the hands of 11 seed Syracuse. The youth prospered, but ultimately fell short of realizing their goals. Over the next few articles, I’ll dive into the 2017-18 Michigan State Spartans, what went right, what went wrong, and what caused it all.
Young and accomplished
I’ve already demonstrated how unusual it was for a Michigan State team to feature so many younger players. It’s also quite rare for a team that is so young to have such a strong regular season. The Spartans ranked 282nd (out of 351) in KenPom’s experience metric, which weights minutes played by the experience of each player. They parlayed their youth into a #4 seed for the NCAA Tournament, and only 2 teams ranked lower in experience got a better seed: Auburn and Duke. Both of these teams had at least 1 upperclassman starter, whereas Michigan State effectively did not. Neither team made the Final Four, but this shouldn’t be considered an indictment of youth; the national champion Villanova Wildcats ranked 280th in experience, just above the Spartans.
You might expect a young team to have ups and downs through the season, but that wasn’t really the case for Michigan State; at least not in terms of wins and losses. They had 5 losses on the season, and the first 4 were all to teams ranked in the top 16 by KenPom. Even the 5th was to the 41st ranked team (Syracuse), who went on to make the Final Four. They had zero bad losses.
The Spartans had several strong wins, too. They beat eventual #2 seed North Carolina on a neutral court, #2 seed Purdue at home, and collected wins over top-40 KenPom teams Notre Dame, Maryland (2x), and Penn State. A down year for the Big Ten offered less than the usual compliment of statement wins, but the Spartans clearly belonged in the upper echelon of contenders.
They ended the season rated 6th at KenPom, with the #13 rated offense and #10 rated defense. They ranked #1 in opponent effective FG%, #1 in opponent 2point FG%, #1 in block rate, and #4 in offensive rebound rate. They were also in the top 25 in effective FG%, 3 point FG%, and 2 point FG%.
The Spartans certainly had their share of weaknesses. They knew how to share the ball (#1 in assist rate), but all that passing could lead to miscues (236th in turnover rate). In 20 conference games, Michigan State had more turnovers than their opponent 17 times! They were strong defensively at guarding the basket, but rarely forced turnovers (341st); this made them vulnerable to opponents having a hot shooting night. On the season the Spartans posted a worse eFG% than their opponent only 5 times, but they went 2-3 in those games.
Bad games came in bunches
I said before that Michigan State didn’t have the ups and downs you’d expect from a young team, but I qualified that by saying “in terms of wins and losses”. That’s a bit too simplistic of a way to judge performances, don’t you agree? I prefer to look at scoring margin per possession, adjusted for opponent strength; I called it adjusted margin or adjusted +/-. I’ll usually state it in terms of 100 possessions to get rid of pesky decimal places.
Michigan State posted an adjusted margin of +28 points per 100 possessions for the season, excluding garbage time. That is excellent, and would be a top-10 or top-5 level rating in most any season. But they did tend to group their poor performances together. The 7 worst performances all season (by adjusted margin) came in 2 groups: a 3 game stretch from January 7-13, and a 4 game stretch from March 2-18. That last stretch was particularly poorly timed, as it was the entirety of their postseason run.
Over these 7 games the Spartans posted an adjusted margin of just +4 per 100 possessions. That is roughly equivalent to the 110th best team in the country. Their usual great shooting deserted them, as they hit 29% of their threes and posted an effective FG% of just 46%. They remained turnover-prone, and became foul-prone. In an upcoming article, I’ll dive into these stretches and identify just where things fell apart for the Spartans.
An embarassment of big man riches
Many of the categories where the Spartans rated highly were a direct result of their interior play. This team had a frontline most college teams would kill for. They had 3 future NBA draft picks up front in starters Miles Bridges & Jaren Jackson, Jr. with freshman Xavier Tillman coming off the bench. Nick Ward led the nation in offensive rebounding rate and was 85th in defensive rebounding rate. Senior Gavin Schilling would have ranked in the top 90 in both as well if he played enough minutes to qualify. Jackson was 4th in block rate. They went 5 deep with true impact players in the frontcourt.
The problem was, they may have gone too big too often. Contrary to the modern trend towards smallball, the Spartans frequently played huge lineups with the 6’7” 230lb Bridges at small forward alongside 2 of Ward, Jackson, Schilling, or Tillman. Each of the latter 4 were 6’8” or taller and 240 lbs or more. Many observers of the team felt that they had potential to play more smallball with Bridges at power forward and only 1 of their traditional bigs.
To Izzo’s credit, he did play 1 big lineups more than people may remember now. The Spartans tried this for 860 possessions, or about 40% of their non-garbage time. On the surface, it didn’t seem to make a difference. 1 big lineups had an adjusted margin of +26 points/100 possessions, a bit below the team’s average. The extra perimeter player increased the team’s 3 point shooting and reduced turnovers, but the team rebounded a bit worse and was a bit worse defensively overall.
It mattered greatly, however, which big was the 1 they played. When they had either Jaren Jackson, Jr. or Xavier Tillman as the lone big, the Spartans posted a sterling +41/100 poss adjusted margin. When it was Ward, Schilling, or anyone else, that dropped to just +17. In an upcoming article, I’ll explore how the Spartans managed their big man rotation and where it may have held them back.
I hope you enjoyed this first look inside the 2017-18 Michigan State Spartans. Over the next couple of articles I’ll peruse the data to analzye their performances more and uncover some hidden truths about them. First up, I look at their 2 worst stretches of the season, try to identify what went wrong, and what they could have done to fix it.