Oregon’s 10th three of the first half went through just after the first-half buzzer sounded at the Breslin Center in East Lansing.
Halftime: Oregon 50, Michigan State 36.
It’s times like these where championships are won and lost. If MSU wanted a Big Ten title, it needed this game to truly stick around the conversation.
Illness had spread through the team following its trip to Los Angeles that resulted in two losses and no wins. Floor general Jeremy Fears Jr. was out along with forward Xavier Booker. Senior leader Jaden Akins was available, but was also sick himself.
Once Michigan State got to the locker room at the half, one of the players who ended up speaking to the team was interesting: 19-year-old freshman Jase Richardson.
“The big thing was saying ‘We can’t lose,'” said junior center Carson Cooper. “That was the big thing. I think we all knew that, but it kind of struck us in the second half like, ‘Bro, we can’t do this. We have to win, we have to win. And we have to stay together and continue to play (good) basketball.’ Because we weren’t playing our level of basketball in the first half, and that’s what we did (in the second half).”
“(I said) ‘We’ve got to punch first,'” Richardson said of his halftime speech, “‘We’ve got to come out with the energy. We’ve got to go on the run early and let them know that this game is not over.’ I feel like that was the biggest thing I said.”
Final score: Michigan State 86, Oregon 74.
Richardson's impact?
He provided 18 of his career-high 29 points in the second half. He also had five rebounds, an assist, and a block during 35 minutes of turnover-free basketball, for good measure.
“We just knew we had to come in and win this game,” Richardson said. “This game was kind of crucial to our season, honestly, because (if) you lose this game, you might really drop your chances of winning a Big Ten title.”
“Jase is a gamer, man,” said junior guard Tre Holloman. “He just wants to win, so we all just rallied around him because he was having a day today. We just had to feed off of that energy.”
Freshmen don't usually play like this.
“We all knew Jase was an amazing player,” Cooper said. “The talent he’s got is unreal, but today, it really kind of opened our eyes. Someone like that — a freshman to come in, step up when Fears is out and (Booker) is out, to step up and kind of accept the pressure and accept the role is huge for us. It’s big, too, that we’re able to look for him in scoring moments and big-time moments.”
MSU’s comeback was largely done in the exact way Richardson spoke of in the locker room. The Spartans absolutely punched first during the final 20 minutes, immediately going on a 12-0 run to get the deficit down to two.
Oregon did respond by pushing its lead back to nine, but the Spartans and Richardson threw an even bigger haymaker: a 17-2 run that pushed MSU ahead by six.
That was when Richardson took over, even after such a large run. Over a span of just under four minutes - that included 48 seconds on the bench - Richardson outscored everyone else, Spartan or Duck, 10-6.
