Michigan State Spartans Basketball
The Michigan State Spartans men's basketball team represents Michigan State University (MSU) and competes in the Big Ten Conference of NCAA Division I. The team currently plays at the Breslin Student Events Center. Since 1995, Tom Izzo has been the teams head coach, presiding over a prolonged period of success.
Michigan State men's basketball team has a long history that is rich in tradition. The team has won two NCAA championships and 13 Big Ten championships in men's basketball. The Spartans won the National Championship in both the 1979 NCAA Tournament and 2000 NCAA Tournament. The 1979 National Championship story line was highly touted as Magic vs. Bird. It was achieved by a team under the coaching of Jud Heathcote that included MVP Magic Johnson, Greg Kelser and Jay Vincent. MSU beat the then undefeated Indiana State Sycamores, led by future NBA hall of famer Larry Bird. The 2000 National Championship was achieved by Morris Peterson, A.J. Granger, Charlie Bell, Jason Richardson and MVP Mateen Cleaves leading the team in a victory over the Florida Gators.
Michigan State basketball has been selected for 15 consecutive NCAA tournament bids (1998–2012) as of the end of the 2011 season, which is the third-longest active streak of NCAA tournament bids, behind Kansas (23) and Duke (17). Overall, Michigan State has been to the Final Four a total of eight times in its history (1957, 1979, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2005, 2009, and 2010), which is tied for seventh all time, and has made 26 NCAA Tournament appearances. Only six schools have more total Final Four appearances. The program is also 7th all time in NCAA tournament winning percentage.
On December 13, 2003, Michigan State and Kentucky played at the most-attended college basketball game in history known as the Basketbowl. They played this game in front of 78,129 people at Ford Field, a football stadium converted to a basketball court for this game in Detroit. Kentucky won this game by a score of 79–74.
Read more about Michigan State Spartans Basketball: Coaches, Postseason History, Uniforms, Home Court
Famous quotes containing the words state and/or basketball:
“Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, which made the Powers behave the way they did. I have no illusions on this score, nor do I believe that any Asian nation or African nation, in the same state of dominance, and with the same system of colonial profit-amassing and plunder, would have behaved otherwise.”
—Han Suyin (b. 1917)
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)