EAST LANSING — Madison Square Garden has been unkind to Tom Izzo.
Rutgers hasn’t been much more hospitable to No. 8 Michigan State in recent years, either.
The Big Ten-leading Spartans (16-2, 7-0), winners of 11 straight, face Rutgers (10-9, 3-5) at 1:30 p.m. Saturday at the iconic venue in New York. It will be the Scarlet Knights’ first game televised nationally on CBS since the 1991 NCAA tournament and their first in the regular season since 1983.
“It’s gonna be Fourth of July and Christmas for them,” Izzo said Wednesday. “But it’s gonna be kind of exciting for us. And I just hope that we continue to play with the energy that we’ve had and kind of build on the consistency.”
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MSU is 4-17 all-time at the Garden, considered one of the meccas of basketball in America. Izzo is 4-13, with his last win coming against Wisconsin in the 2018 Big Ten tournament, in its lone New York appearance.
Meantime, the Spartans have lost three of their past five to Rutgers, including a Feb. 4, 2023, regular-season game at MSG. That season, MSU’s season ended there in the NCAA tournament Sweet 16 a little more than a month later, with an overtime loss to Kansas State.
“I’ve never won there before,” said senior Jaden Akins, who is 0-3 at the Garden. “So I’m looking to get a win there and play team basketball and just get it done.”
The challenge for MSU in this meeting is trying to stop the Scarlet Knights’ two NBA draft prospects, freshmen Ace Bailey and Dylan Harper, who are the second- and third-leading scorers in the Big Ten.
Bailey, a 6-foot-10, 200-pound swingman, leads Rutgers at 19.9 points a game and ranks eighth in the conference at 7.9 rebounds. He also has 23 blocks and 18 steals total while shooting 39.3% from 3-point range.
Harper, a 6-6 guard (and the son of former NBA star Ron Harper), is averaging 19.3 points with 5.1 rebounds and 4.3 assists per game to go with 19 steals and 10 blocks total. He also is a deep threat at 34.1% on 3s.
“Their two superstars in Bailey and Harper are legitimate,” Izzo said. “You see Bailey makes some shots that are unbelievable, and Harper just has an incredible feel. They’re two of the better players I’ve seen in this league in a while.”
Those two are driving a revamped roster for the Scarlet Knights, who start two other freshmen in 6-7 forward Dylan Grant and 6-10, 275-pound center Lathan Sommerville. Although there have been growing pains in the transition — including a November loss at Kennesaw State — Pikiell remains the steady hand steering the program that embraces many of the same tenets of gritty defense and across-the-board toughness that Izzo preaches.
“They just run a good offense. They know how to try to get mismatches on offense,” Akins said. “They play tough defense, and they just play physically.”
Rutgers hired Pikiell before the 2016-17 season, and Izzo has been consistently complimentary of the former Stony Brook coach’s style and approach even as MSU won the first six times they played after the coaching change.
Then the Scarlet Knights beat the Spartans handily in back-to-back years. The first was an ugly 30-point MSU loss at the Rutgers Athletic Center in 2021, in the Spartans’ first game after a 10-day COVID pause. The following year, Pikiell’s squad ripped off an 21-point victory at Rutgers, the last time these two met on campus in Piscataway, New Jersey.
In 2023, the game moved to the Garden, a shift in venues that initially irked the Scarlet Knights’ fans. That was until Rutgers pulled away to a six-point victory and had a strong crowd showing, which increased the buzz for taking Saturday’s matchup back to New York.
After not getting to play in the NCAA tournament when it was canceled in 2020, Rutgers made March Madness in 2021 — its first NCAA appearance in 30 years — and did it again in 2022. The Scarlet Knights slipped into the NIT in 2023 and then missed the postseason a year ago. This year’s squad is teetering toward missing the NCAAs again after losing four of its past six, including Monday’s 80-72 defeat at Penn State.
“It’s a new team. Every year is gonna be like this, you gotta kind of figure them out,” Pikiell told reporters Monday. “I think we’re heading in the right direction.”
That makes Saturday’s marquee matchup with MSU — on the big stage at the Garden and under the national spotlight — a potentially pivotal point for the Scarlet Knights. But it also is a chance for the Spartans to continue to surge and extend their longest win streak since winning 13 in a row en route to making Izzo’s most recent Final Four in 2019.
“This game, I don’t know, they could have moved any of their games there. They moved our game there,” Izzo said. “Is that a compliment? A plus? A minus? It just happens, I don’t know. But I just think it’s great when your players get a chance to play in places and do things that will be memory-making for them.”
Michigan State vs Rutgers prediction
It will be another “rock fight,” as both Izzo and Pikiell have termed their previous meetings. But the Spartans’ depth wears down the Scarlet Knights at both ends in the Garden, and their defensive tenacity and versatility stymies Bailey and Harper enough to extend their win streak to 12 in a row. The pick: MSU 77, Rutgers 68.
Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him @chrissolari.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Tom Izzo, Michigan State basketball try to solve Rutgers, NYC
