2021 Big Ten Tournament Preview

There’s no team in the Big Ten that has more history with Maryland men’s basketball than Michigan State.

While Maryland hasn’t played them in the national title game like Indiana, The Terps have twice fallen victim to the Spartans in the NCAA tournament. A 2003 Sweet Sixteen contest saw the Terps lose 60-58, while a 2010 second-round meeting saw a buzzer-beater provide a devastating end to the career of Greivis Vasquez.

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Once Maryland joined the Big Ten, the important meetings with MSU continued. The Terps made their Big Ten debut at the Breslin Center, earning a sloppy 68-66 win in double overtime, despite committing 22 turnovers and making just 18 percent of their threes. Maryland’s first two losses in the Big Ten tournament also came at the hands of Tom Izzo, with the 2014-15 and 2015-16 teams both winning one game in the tournament before being eliminated by MSU. I’m not going to recap every other Maryland-MSU meeting, but the point is that there’s been plenty of notable meetings between these schools and on Thursday, we’ll have the latest chapter between the two schools in the Big Ten tournament.

Maryland’s dreadful loss to Penn State would’ve been bad even if it didn’t impact their seeding in the conference tournament but unfortunately, it did. A win over the Nittany Lions would’ve given Maryland a matchup with Indiana, who has lost its last five games and six of its last seven and has been struggling through year four of the Archie Miller era. Instead, it gets MSU.

Following a 10-point loss to Purdue on February 16, it looked like the Spartans were just about dead in the water for making the NCAA tournament with a 4-9 conference record and no quality wins. From there, they knocked off Indiana at Assembly Hall and then beat top ten ranked Illinois and Ohio State in three days to revitalize their tournament chances. As you already know, Maryland stopped their momentum with a 73-55 win on February 28, but MSU continued to chug along with another win over Indiana and ended the season with a win over Michigan. Using the NET rankings, only 15 schools have more Quad 1 wins than MSU, so they’ve got plenty of good wins to hang their hat on.

Since MSU appears to be going on a typical hot streak to end the year, let’s look at the blueprint Maryland provided as they beat the Spartans last week to see if it can be repeated in Indianapolis.

The first step to success in their 73-55 win was a hot start. They took an 11-0 lead and didn’t allow MSU to score until there was 13:51 left in the first half. Unlike the similar quick starts against Northwestern and Penn State, they made that early lead hold up for the entire game, never letting the Spartans take the lead at any point of the game.

The fast start was also helped by forcing MSU to become very reliant on the three-pointer as Izzo’s squad took 49.1% of their field goal attempts from deep. That was the second-highest percentage of threes to twos MSU had this year and when over 40 percent of their field goal attempts are threes, the Spartans are just 1-4 in B1G play.

A fast start and forcing MSU to chuck threes was also aided by plenty of time spent at the free-throw line. Maryland went 23-for-24 against the Spartans. The 24 free throw attempts were the fourth-most they had in a Big Ten game and the 23 made shots were the most in all of their B1G games. It was also just the third time all year they made over 90 of their shots from the charity stripe. In comparison, Maryland combined for just 11 made free throws on 20 attempts in its final two games, so that certainly demonstrates the value of getting to the line.

Michigan State last went 0-1 in the Big Ten tournament in 2010, while Maryland has done so in the last three tournaments they played. If the Terps can repeat their fast start, force MSU to shoot threes and consistently get to the line, then we could be looking at a reversal of fortunes for the two schools.

If Maryland can get past the Spartans they’d have a third meeting with Michigan, who they’ve already lost to twice. In the first meeting, Maryland made nearly 60 percent of its threes and still lost by 11 points and the second meeting was a blowout where Maryland trailed 22-8 after the first ten minutes. I don’t want to say it’d be impossible for Maryland to beat Michigan, but the first two meetings haven’t shown much evidence that the game wouldn’t be a comfortable win for Juwan Howard’s team.

Of course, Maryland isn’t the only team in the Big Ten tournament, so here are three other teams I’ll be paying attention to this week.

Minnesota: #4 Michigan, #5 Iowa and #9 Ohio State have all been beaten by Minnesota this year, yet the Gophers are currently expected to miss the NCAA tournament. Minnesota’s resume of quality wins rivals anyone in the country but their 0-10 record outside of the state of Minnesota is quite the hindrance to making the tournament. They’ve lost seven in a row to end the regular season and are trending in the wrong direction, but their trio of quality wins does make you wonder if they can return to that level of play just in time to save their season with an impressive run.

Ohio State: If there’s such a thing as an acceptable four-game losing streak, Ohio State ended its season on one. The Buckeyes ended the regular season losing to Michigan, Iowa and Illinois at home and Michigan State on the road. Only the loss to Michigan State could be considered an upset and as mentioned already in this article, the Spartans are enjoying one of their typical hot streaks heading into the tournament. A #1 seed in the NCAA tournament is still in play for the Buckeyes this year but to earn that spot, they’d need to end their losing streak.

Rutgers: The first four seasons of Big Ten hoops were a disaster, with the Scarlet Knights never winning more than three conference games. In 2018-19 they started to turn the corner with a 7-13 conference record and last season their 11-9 record in conference play, combined with a win over Seton Hall, was projected to give them a #9 seed in the tournament before coronavirus ended the season. This year, the Scarlet Knights finished conference play with a .500 record highlighted by a win over Illinois. In the 2018 conference tournament, they pulled off a pair of upsets as the #14 seed to make it to the quarterfinals, before giving #3 seed Purdue a close game in an 82-75 loss. Steve Pikiell has already shown he can put together a tournament run with a much weaker team, so who knows what Rutgers can do as the #7 seed in this year’s bracket.