Spartans again test Purdue, but fall short in Big Ten tourney
No. 8 Michigan State was looking forward to another crack at No. 1 Purdue in the Big Ten Tournament quarterfinals on Friday.
The Spartans gave it their best shot. It just wasn’t enough to slay the Big Ten giant.
Michigan State came up just short in the 67-62 slugfest against Purdue. The Friday matinee included a bloody nose, two technical fouls, plenty of trash talk and went down to the wire.
“We just battled,” Tom Izzo said. “That was a football game on hardwood, that’s all it was.”
Purdue led the game for all but 29 seconds until Tyson Walker tied it at 56-56 with 1:41 left in regulation. Purdue’s Fletcher Loyer, though, responded seconds later with the goahead 3.
Zach Edey made a basket to give Purdue a five-point advantage with 34 seconds remaining, but A.J. Hoggard once again trimmed it to three with two free throws.
After a timeout, Lance Jones split a pair of free throws. Malik Hall made an easy dunk to make it 6260 with 19.7 seconds left, but that would be the closest Michigan State would get.
Edey, made it a two-possession game seconds later, draining two free throws to all but seal the win for Purdue, which will advance to play the winner of No. 5 Wisconsin and No. 4 Northwestern on Saturday. Meanwhile, Michigan State was bounced from the conference tournament and await its seeding and opponent for the NCAA Tournament, which will be unveiled Sunday.
Despite the heartbreaking outcome, Michigan State was proud of the way it played.
”We’ve been talking about 40 minutes for the longest time and I think we went out there and played a full 40 minutes tonight,” Hoggard said. “Yeah, they made runs, basketball is a game of runs, we made runs, and things like that. We just didn’t do a good enough job to finish it off.”
Even though Purdue is believed to already be a lock for a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament, it was clear from the jump that Michigan State wasn’t going down without a fight. The Spartans played some of their best defense all season and went toeto-toe with the Boilermakers. Michigan State outrebounded Purdue by one and had eight blocks to the Boilermakers’ three. But the Spartans couldn’t capitalize on enough of the good looks they produced, shooting 39% from the field and going 4-for18 from 3.