ANN ARBOR – Nine years to the day after Travis Trice began his famed end-of-senior-season run of stardom for Michigan State with 22 points in a win at Michigan, another senior showing signs of a late-career run himself, Malik Hall, poured in 18 points for the Spartans in a 73-63 win over the Wolverines .
It sure would make for a tidy storyline if Hall could follow suit and turn it up a notch in the final weeks of his final season and take the Spartans places we can’t picture them going right now.
The notion that there’s a long line of MSU seniors who’ve done this in the Izzo era is actually just the lore of Trice repeated over and over. Maybe Goran Suton’s NCAA tournament run, too. Xavier Tillman might fit, as well, though he was only a junior. Tillman put together four incredible games at the end shutting down opposing centers and power forwards before the pandemic shut down everyone. There have been other great seniors, but not players who were just good and then, through some combination of urgency and sweat equity, reached a level near the end that they hadn’t before.