Indiana
Michigan State suffers another close loss in final regular season game vs. Indiana, 65-64
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – One shot after another missed the mark, clanging off the rim and banging off the backboard.
One Michigan State basketball player after another tumbled to the floor, losing their footing – figuratively and literally – on offense and defense.
One rebound after another went to Indiana, the Spartans getting outpositioned, outmuscled and outhustled.
It could not have been a worse start for Tom Izzo’s team in its last regular-season game. After all, he pointed to this road trip against the Hoosiers as the start of “tournament time” for MSU. Only the Spartans didn’t get started Sunday until they found themselves down 16 points a little more than 12 minutes into the game.
That woke them up. And those same shots started dropping. A 33-10 comeback run between the end of the first half and the start of the second flipped it into a seven-point lead.
Only to watch it all slip away in the end.
Tyson Walker scored 20 of his 30 points in a furious second-half rally, but the senior missed a driving layup with 6 seconds left and Indiana tipped the ball out to escape with a 65-64 victory at Assembly Hall.
MSU (18-13, 10-10 Big Ten) opens Big Ten tournament play Thursday as the No. 8 seed, drawing the No. 9 seed in the noon game that day at Target Center (streaming on Peacock). That winner gets the dubious task of facing No. 1 seed Purdue on Friday.
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Kel’el Ware scored 19 of his 28 points in the second half, including splitting a pair of free throws with 17.8 seconds to play, to give Indiana (18-13, 10-10) its final lead in a game filled with three lead changes and four ties in the final half.
Ware added 12 rebounds, while Malik Reneau scored 16 points with five boards and five assists and Mackenzie Mgbako added 13 points.
Jaden Akins and A.J. Hoggard each had 10 points and Malik Hall added seven, but they combined to go 11-for-33 from the floor. Walker was 11-for-21 as the Spartans shot 38.5% overall and went 8-for-25 from 3-point range. Hall had seven rebounds, while Hoggard had six assists.
Worst start imaginable
Things could not have started much worse for MSU at both ends of the court.
Xavier Booker got his second start in the last four games, and it was evident from the outset that facing Indiana’s young and talented frontcourt was a bad matchup for the Spartans’ freshman. He missed rebounding opportunities and struggled defensively as the Hoosiers attacked him inside and pounded the boards.
That also coincided with a brutal start on offense in which MSU missed 12 of its first 14 shots. Indiana opened 8-of-14 from the field and spaced things out by going 4-for-5 from 3-point range in the first 6:46 to build a 20-5 lead.
The Hoosiers’ lead swelled to 16 on a Ware banked-in jumper from the paint with 7:53 to go. But Mady Sissoko threw down a dunk after a lob entry pass from Hoggard that jumpstarted the Spartans’ comeback run as their defense began to finally began to disrupt Indiana’s offensive rhythm.
After that hot start, the Hoosiers finished 5-for-17 and committed all nine of their first-half turnovers in the final 12:35. MSU fought back from a 16-point hole with a 19-8 run in the last 7:28 to trail 34-29 at half.
Walker, who missed his first three shots, started to heat up after a driving layup turned into a three-point play with 8:35 left. He would hit two more jumpers after Sissoko’s dunk, then buried a 3-pointer with a minute left before half. Hall’s tip-in with 9 seconds left helped the Spartans close the half on a 19-8 surge in the final 7:28 to pull within 34-29 at the break.
After opening the game 3-for-20, the Spartans made nine of their final 12 attempts. Walker had 10 points at the break, while Hoggard hit both of his 3-point tries as the rest of his teammates were 1-for-8.
Indiana got 29 points and 15 rebounds from its inside trio of Ware, Reneau and Mgbako in the first half. The Hoosiers had a dominating 24-15 advantage on the boards.
Too little too late
That momentum carried over into the second half, with MSU coming out of the locker room with a Walker-fueled 14-2 burst to take the lead.
On one trip, Akins got three 3-point attempts and finally buried his third. He connected with another on the next trip, then Walker hit his second of the half to force Indiana coach Mike Woodson to call timeout 4:02 into the half. Out of that, Hoggard drove and dropped a floater after exceptional perimeter ball movement from Akins and Walker. MSU found itself up 43-36 with 15:24 to play.
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But Indiana again began to take the ball inside to exploit the Spartans in the paint. Ware and Reneau combined for 14 straight Hoosier points, while Walker had eight of the Spartans’ 10 in that stretch. But an 8-0 Indiana run, with back-to-back 3-pointers from Mgbako over Hoggard and another from Xavier Johnson, gave Indiana back the lead and set up a back-and-forth finish over the last eight-plus minutes.
The two teams traded buckets and leads from there, with a Carson Cooper put-back dunk after Johnson’s 3-pointer giving MSU some juice back. Walker hit a pair of free throws with 2:10 left, but Ware answered with a layup through a foul but missed the free throw. Then Walker landed another counter punch to tie it up at 64-all with a driving layup around ware with 1:29 to play.
MSU had a chance to take the lead after that, but Walker missed a layup and Cooper’s put-back attempt banged off the rim and got knocked out. Ware posted up Hall and drew a foul with 17.8 left, missing the first but hitting the second.
With 14.5 left, after an MSU timeout, Walker drove right. His shot missed, then got knocked away to midcourt, where the Hoosiers gathered it up and raced downcourt to run out the clock.
Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him @chrissolari.
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INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — A man is dead after a shooting Thursday night on Indy’s near east side, police say.
According to the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, just after 8 p.m., officers were called to the 2000 block of East Washington Street on a report of a person shot.
When officers arrived, they found an adult male inside an apartment with injuries consistent with gunshot wounds.
Indianapolis Emergency Medical Services transported the man to a hospital in critical condition, where died shortly after arriving.
Homicide detectives responded to the scene to begin the investigation.
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Gov. Mike Braun asked state regulators to reconsider their decision to greenlight a $71 million rate increase for AES Indiana, doubling down on his condemnation of a move that could leave Indianapolis residents with higher electrical bills for years.
Braun wrote in a June 18 news release that he had asked Indiana Utility Counselor Abby Gray, who heads the office representing ratepayers in proceedings before the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, to petition for a rehearing of the AES rate case.
Gray indicated in the release that her office would submit the petition shortly. No petition had been posted on the IURC’s online docket as of this story’s publication.
The rate increase, which was approved by the IURC on June 17, was substantially less than the $192 million increase that AES initially requested. It was also less than the amount proposed in a settlement last October between AES and major electricity consumers.
But the Office of Utility Consumer Counselor, which Gray leads, came out strongly against any increase to AES’s base rates. In September, the OUCC called for a $21 million reduction instead.
As the Republican Party grapples with rising discontent over affordability, Braun has used opposition to rising utility rates to telegraph that he’s committed to keeping costs down for Indiana residents. He signed a law in February that allows the state to make rate-setting decisions that reward or penalize utilities based on metrics including affordability.
In March, he told reporters that he would take on Indiana’s five investor-owned utilities, describing himself as the “new sheriff in town.”
And after the IURC voted 3-1 to approve the AES rate increase, he wrote in a post to X that he was “deeply disappointed.”
Braun wrote in the June 18 news release that he had appointed Gray, a longtime OUCC lawyer and judge, to her current post because he knew she “would help me fight for Hoosiers.”
According to AES’s estimates, the rate increase will cost households an additional $5 per month for every 1,000 kilowatt hours of electricity they use, beginning in July. A second hike will take effect in January.
Tilly Robinson is a Pulliam fellow for the Indianapolis Star. She can be reached at tilly.robinson@indystar.com.
The Protect College Sports Act, legislation meant to introduce and codify sweeping reforms related to college athletics, passed out of the Senate Commerce Committee on Thursday morning.
It now heads to the Senate floor.
The bill passed out of committee by a 19-9 vote. Indiana Republican Sen. Todd Young voted no, his decision reflecting Big Ten concerns over the bill.
A spokesman for Sen. Young told IndyStar, “Senator Young hopes that additional changes can be made to the bill to address concerns raised by the Big Ten.”
Co-sponsored by Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Maria Cantwell (D-Washington), the Protect College Sports Act represents Congress’ most substantial success so far in a yearslong effort to bring legislative reform to college athletics. Since before the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders in college sports — including the NCAA, member conferences and schools, and other major players — have lobbied for national solutions to what have become state and regional problems.
Several pieces of legislation have been introduced across the last several years, only to fizzle long before reaching the floor of either chamber. The SCORE Act, introduced last year in the House of Representatives, gained some traction and passed out of committee, but was never brought to the floor.
Which makes Thursday’s news meaningful. Moving the Protect College Sports Act to the Senate floor, while not a guarantee of any outcome, potentially takes the bill past a threshold no other such piece of reformative legislation has yet been able to cross.
Cruz told Yahoo! Sports’ Ross Dellenger on Thursday that Cruz believes Sen. Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) is committed to introducing the bill to the Senate floor soon.
The bill provides a legal framework for a host of potential reforms and protections for college sports. It grants limited antitrust protection to the NCAA, places limits on certain things including potential conference realignment, builds safeguards meant to protect non-revenue and Olympic sports, addresses potential broadcast rights reforms, and more.
It enjoys significant backing, and not just among leaders in college sports. This week, the NFL, its players’ association, the National Basketball Players Association and Major League Baseball all voiced their support for the bill.
Two key constituencies not in lockstep on the bill voiced their own concerns Thursday.
In a joint statement issued just after 10 a.m. Thursday, the Big Ten and SEC — far and away the two most powerful conferences and arguably two greatest power centers, full stop, in college athletics — suggested they still hold significant reservations over the bill.
“From the outset, we identified a set of essential revisions to the PCSA necessary for the long-term sustainability of college athletics,” the statement read. “We have worked with both majority and minority staff to advance those revisions, which focus on better supporting student-athletes and stabilizing the college sports environment. We continue to believe revisions are needed to secure our support for the bill.
“Despite our sustained engagement and good faith efforts, these critical revisions have not been accepted.”
The statement went on to note the “several Commerce Committee members that share our concerns and support these recommendations.”
Young is one of several members of the committee representing a Big Ten state, including one of three Republicans. He is the only Republican member of the committee whose state contains multiple schools in the conference.
Allowing for those reservations, Thursday’s news is still significant. It marks the first time a bipartisan bill on the subject has reached this point in the Senate and, should it be brought to the floor, it would be the first such legislation to reach that stage, in either chamber.
The bill could be brought to the Senate floor as early as July, though that timeline remains fluid.
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