Michigan State Men’s Basketball’s Upcoming Season Projected with Intriguing Results

Michigan State basketball has had plenty of excitement this offseason so far. Former Spartans forward Xavier Tillman Sr. recently won the 2024 NBA championship with the Boston Celtics.

The Spartans are continuing their push for blue-chip 2025 basketball targets in five-star in-state guard Trey McKenney, who recently stood out with the United States U18 National team at the FIBA AmeriCup, and five-star forward Niko Bundalo, who will be heading overseas soon to play with Serbian team.

In the transfer portal, new additions in forward Frankie Fidler and center Szymon Zapala.

Nothing will match the feeling brought on whenever coach Tom Izzo and his team take the court at the Breslin Center, but Spartans basketball is still a long while off for the Spartan faithful.

Recently, analytics site Bart Torvik projected the Spartans upcoming season, along with all of college basketball.

The Spartans were ranked No. 20 in the projections, with a record of 20-11 overall and an 11-9 record in Big Ten play. The Spartans were the third highest-ranked team behind new arrival UCLA, ranked 14th, and Purdue, ranked 11th. UCLA was projected to finish 23-8 with a 14-6 conference record, and Purdue’s projected record was 20-11, 12-8 in conference play.

The site ranked all teams using their T-Ranking system:

“The core of T-Rank is calculating offensive and defensive efficiency: points scored and points allowed per possession (‘PPP’ meanspoints per possession, often rendered as points per 100 possessions). Although coaches like Dean Smith and Bo Ryan have long relied on PPP, it really hit the big time when Ken Pomeroy popularized it about a decade ago … Kenpom’s innovation … was to separate out the offensive and defensive PPP and then adjust them for opponent quality and venue. Although Kenpom has made some changes over the years, that’s still the core of his ratings, and that is also the core of T-Rank.”

The contributors for the T-Rankings note the use of famed baseball sabermetrics guru Bill James’ “Pythagorean expectation”, which to gauge a team’s overall chances of winning against the average Division I team, along with James’ log5 formula to “calculate their expected chance of winning against any other team.”

The Spartans will look to improve on the court with the losses of notable players such as Tyson Walker and Malik Hall. However, they have plenty to be excited for. The 2023 recruiting class was one of Izzo’s finest, and Xavier Booker, Jeremy Fears Jr. and Coen Carr will look to have big roles in Year 2. Fidler and Zapala will be heavy hitters, too.

2024 could be a season that surprises.

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