No current Michigan State basketball player has ever won at Michigan. Will that change tonight?
EAST LANSING — No one on Michigan State basketball’s roster has won at Michigan.
Not Malik Hall, whose freshman team in 2020 lost there.
Not A.J. Hoggard, whose freshman team in 2021 lost there. Nor Jaden Akins in 2022 or Tre Holloman in 2023.
Add another item to the Spartans’ late-season to-do list.
“We just gotta win road games now. So its both, to try and win on the road and trying to get a win there,” senior guard Tyson Walker, winless in two tries at Crisler Center, said after practice Thursday. “It's not easy.”
MSU (16-9, 8-6 Big Ten) makes the return trip Saturday to Crisler to face the Wolverines for the second time this season. Tipoff is 8 p.m. (Fox) and comes 18 days after the Spartans blasted U-M, 81-62, on Jan. 30 at Breslin Center.
Izzo said his biggest concern is getting leadership and consistency from his veterans to string together back-to-back road wins, with the focus less about what has happened in the past — this year or any other season.
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“Right now, when they go to the locker room, they should be talking about the Michigan game,” MSU coach Tom Izzo said after practice Thursday. “When they go out to eat, they should be talking about the Michigan game. You go up for a film session, that should be on their minds.”
But Izzo and his players know both the difficulty of playing on the road in the league this year and that the last-place Wolverines (8-17, 3-11) will look much different the second time around. They played the first game against MSU this season without leading scorer Dug McDaniel, whose road-game suspension prevented him from traveling to MSU last month.
McDaniel averages 16.8 points, 4.7 assists and 3.8 rebounds in 20 games this season. However, the 5-foot-11, 175-pound sophomore point guard has not played a road game since Jan. 7 at Penn State for academic reasons. In his five home games this season since coach Juwan Howard levied the part-time playing punishment, McDaniel is posting 13.6 points, 3.6 assists and 1.4 turnovers in 34 minutes.
“They're a completely different team…,” from the first meeting, Izzo said. “You got your best player out — in half the games, out half the games. It's gotta be very, very, very difficult, something most of us never, ever have gone through.”
Last season as a freshman, McDaniel’s two games against MSU personified the way the rivalry has gone over the past half-decade.
In a 59-53 Spartans home win Jan. 7, 2023, McDaniel missed all four of his shots and went scoreless with four assists and three turnovers On Feb. 18, 2023, at Crisler, McDaniel hit 6 of 10 shots, including five 3-pointers, and had 18 points, four assists and no turnovers in U-M's 84-72 victory.
“Dug is real good on the ball, which is big for his team, and it puts less pressure on everybody else,” Walker said. “So and he's just really aggressive in transition. So it's (about) trying to contain him. … They're still a good team, and they're really talented. And they play really well at home, so we just gotta play together and play well.”
One thing the first meeting this season showed: the home team continues to hold court in this series.
It has been five years since the last time the Spartans emerged from Ann Arbor victorious, a Cassius Winston- and Xavier Tillman-led win Feb. 24, 2019. The home team has won all nine regular-season meetings the past four-plus seasons, including their meeting in January. That streak is 10 straight when including MSU’s victory to wrap up the 2019 conference slate as Izzo’s team headed toward a Big Ten tournament title win over the Wolverines and his most recent Final Four appearance.
The Spartans have dropped four in a row to Howard at Crisler Center, losing by an average of 13 points per game. Izzo has never lost five straight there over his 29 seasons. His other four-game losing streak in Ann Arbor came between 2011-14 against John Beilein, by an average of 4.5 points.
“I definitely want to go down there and get a win,” said Hoggard, a senior point guard who is 0-3 at Crisler. “I haven't gotten one yet.”
MSU lost seven straight at Crisler from 1971-77; the Spartans have not lost more than four straight there since. Jud Heathcote also lost four straight road games in the rivalry between 1987-90.
All-time, the Wolverines have a 65-32 advantage in Ann Arbor, while the Spartans are 55-38 in East Lansing. Neither team has won more than four in a row on the other’s court in the rivalry.
U-M is 5-7 at home this season, with Big Ten wins at Crisler over No. 21 Wisconsin on Feb. 7 and Ohio State on Jan. 15. The Wolverines have lost their other 12 games overall since a mid-December home win over Eastern Michigan.
If the Spartans end their current Crisler drought, it adds a critical Quad 2 road victory to their NCAA tournament resume. MSU’s 80-72 win Wednesday at Penn State was just its second of the season in six tries, with two road trips still ahead March 3 at No. 2 Purdue and March 10 at Indiana to close the regular-season.
“We're trying to put some road games together. We dropped a few, so we're just trying to continue to build our road resume,” Hoggard said. “We know what Saturday brings, what it has in store for us. We know it's gonna be on both sides, so it's gonna be a big night for (U-M) and a big night for us. So we just gotta go down with a level head and find a way to win.”
Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him @chrissolari.
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Next up: State of rivalry
Matchup: Michigan State (16-9, 8-6 Big Ten) at Michigan (8-17, 3-11).
Tipoff: 8 p.m. Saturday; Crisler Center, Ann Arbor.
TV/radio: Fox; WJR-AM (760), WWJ-AM (950), WTKA-AM (1050).
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan State basketball looks to snap four-game skid at Michigan
