Couch: Tom Izzo's latest MSU roster is 'perfect' for him – both its championship possibilities and how it's constructed
EAST LANSING – The first question Tom Izzo fielded Wednesday gave a pretty good indication of where his post-season press conference was heading.
“When you say you’re going to have more (players) pushing each other next year …” Audrey Dahlgren of WLNS-TV in Lansing began, following up on Izzo's opening statement.
Izzo jumped in, playfully but like he’d been waiting for it — waiting to point out the irony that, not long ago, the concern was that he had too few players. And now, well, the narrative has flipped.
He might be one scholarship player short of a full roster for next season, but suddenly 12 players seems like too many. There can’t be enough minutes to keep people happy. Not this roster, with eight rotation players coming back and his most heralded recruiting class in some time coming in. Add in the return of fifth-year seniors Malik Hall and Tyson Walker, which threw the natural progression of things out of whack, and you’re really testing the patience of returning players who might be ready to star and freshmen who might be ready to start. And, judging by the rest of college basketball, the transfer portal is just too dang enticing for that dynamic.
That was the gist of the tone from Dahlgren and many of the questions that followed.
Izzo’s response: “I hope it's incredibly competitive. I think the one thing that we've done with all this portal stuff is nobody wants to compete for anything. … I'm not sitting there every night worrying. If someone doesn't want to be here, you know what, I wouldn't want them here. That's the way we have to adjust now and react.”
To be clear, Izzo doesn’t believe anyone is leaving unexpectedly. Someone might put their name in the NBA draft to get an evaluation, he surmised, but he expects his roster as it stands today to be his roster next season. And so, for the time being, Izzo appears to have threaded a needle, constructing a roster like it was 5 or 10 years ago — with highly anticipated high school recruits and veterans who’ve developed within the program and with multiple players at every position who hope to be part of the rotation, and without anything more promised.
This should be his best roster since at least 2017-18 or even 2013-14 — a rare mix, even by the best of his standards, of blue-chip prospects who boost the Spartans’ talent level and seasoned veterans who went to a Sweet 16 together weeks ago. It’s ideal, really. To have your best recruiting class in seven years and not need a single one of them to start.
“If this was three years ago, everybody would be tickled to death, there'd be no question,” Izzo said. “But just because of the way college basketball has swung … that doesn't mean (what’s happening in the sport is) right. I mean, it's still OK to have a process. It’s still OK to get better. And you know what, one of those freshmen might beat one of those juniors or seniors. And if they do, God bless ’em. That's the way it's going to be now. (College basketball is) more transactional. I want it to stay more relationship-based. Hopefully, we can keep this program in the middle somewhere.”
Izzo often comes off poorly when he talks about the transfer portal and the state of play in college hoops. He is an impassioned but sometimes inartful speaker, not built for modern-day media, when 15-second video clips or 280-character quotes is how information is exchanged, regardless of the lack of opportunity for nuance. Izzo can be too annoyed by a situation or too snarky or too tangential to boil his point of view down to a concise few sentences.
And sometimes he’s just too stubborn.
But he cares about his players. That’s not in dispute. And they know it. Even when they don’t like him, they know he wants what’s best for them. That has something to do with why eight of them are coming back — two for an extra year — some of them with fierce competition at their positions.
“I’ve lived my dream. And all I want now at this point in my career is for every player I touch to have a chance to live theirs,” he reiterated Wednesday. “But I know what it takes.”
Izzo hates what the one-time transfer rule is doing to college athletics. He doesn’t hate a player’s ability to transfer or transfers themselves. He can struggle to articulate the difference.
Wednesday, he did it fairly well, because nothing in the moment had set him off.
“I mean, Pierre (Brooks), we talked to Pierre (and) Pierre did what was best for Pierre,” Izzo said of Brooks, who transferred to Butler after falling out of favor at MSU. “I’m as happy for Pierre as I will be for Rocket Watts, Foster Loyer and right on down the road. I mean, you don't keep everybody. Some people leave.”
The departures of those three players over the last few seasons made sense. It had nothing to do with impatience or name, image and likeness endorsement inducements. NIL is part of what’s working for MSU right now. One more reason for someone like Tyson Walker to stay. One more reason for a younger player to be patient.
What scares fans of every program and bothers Izzo especially is the possibility — the likelihood, even — of a player who’s done well or someone with promise leaving because they want something more and they want it now. And they’re told they can get it elsewhere.
While that is their chance to take — or their mistake to make — Izzo loathes that the one-time transfer rule, allowing athletes in every sport to transfer once and play immediately, is seemingly encouraging the error.
“They're impatient because everybody around them is impatient,” Izzo said. “Hell, you guys are impatient. You want to know how many minutes a guy's going to play and he hasn't even gotten on campus yet. You want to know if we’re going to have too many players. Everybody had 13; 90% of the schools probably still have 13. It’s just that I don't like having players on my team that are unhappy. And probably everyone after six is starting to become unhappy. So we have to deal with that. What I still sell to my guys is (there are) a lot of guys that weren't very good as freshmen. And there is a process. You try to sell it, because it's the truth. But the truth is something that people don't want to hear. It is the truth.
“The problem is, for some reason, everybody's pushing these kids so far, so fast. And I'm just afraid that they're never going to understand that failure is probably the best learning experience you can go through. … You're going to have to beat somebody out to play. And I think that message needs to be stronger, no matter who you are and what you are. And the players you love are the ones that say, ‘Bring it on.’ ”
It appears Izzo has a roster of those guys. Or at least a roster full of guys who still see a path for themselves at MSU.
There are counters to Izzo’s points. Among them, his own words: Perhaps the possibility of living to regret transferring is part of a new failure that builds character. The one-time transfer rule can also help kids stay put to see if it works out. Think if you were a soon-to-be sophomore point guard or center on MSU’s roster, unsure where you’ll wind up in the pecking order or when your opportunity will come. Even if you feel like you might one day want or need to transfer, there’s no need to get on with it, like there used to be, when you were going to have to sit out. Might as well let it play out a while longer in East Lansing, where the upside to having it work out could be tremendous.
“Remember, 1% are going into the (NBA) and 3.5% are playing basketball anywhere after college,” Izzo said, citing numbers for college basketball overall, not MSU. “That means that we’ve got to really train a lot of people how to fail, get fired, work harder, have responsibilities, have accountability. There's a lot of things you got to do that matter to me, and I think matter to a lot more coaches than you think. … We'll see how it goes. And maybe, just maybe, I'll be the one saying I was wrong. Maybe the transfer portal is a good thing.”
It was easier for Izzo to stomach that last sentence on a Wednesday in April with his roster seemingly untouched by the portal. At some point, some year, Izzo will lose a player or two or three inconveniently to transfer. At some point, he’ll have to meddle in the portal himself to build out his roster. That’s inevitable if he stays in this long enough.
He sounds like he’s bracing for that, maybe even at peace with it.
“I'm not going to crash and burn,” Izzo said. “I mean, I'm going to adjust. If I've got to dive into something else, the portal or starting five freshmen, I'm not crashing and burning. I have to make the adjustments I have to make.”
For now, he’s probably the envy of almost every other coach — how he and his staff have managed to turn back the clock in constructing a roster. I’m sure he’s enjoying how this team came together as much as he is the possibilities for it — a blend of guys who’ve stayed, guys who still want to be there and recruits that everybody wanted.
This roster is a middle finger to everyone who thinks his style doesn’t work anymore with this generation of players, that kids don’t recognize loyalty, that relationships can’t still win.
“I've got the perfect team for me,” Izzo said. “I've got some veterans. I’ve got some rookies. I've got some guys that are, I think, competitive. I think we'll add some toughness to this year's team. I think we'll get healthy. And I'm embracing the opportunity to be ranked high. I'm embracing the challenge of trying to win another Big Ten championship. And I'm looking forward to the chance to compete for a national championship.”
Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Michigan State basketball: Izzo's latest roster is 'perfect' for him
