Why Penn State’s loss to Michigan State is a reminder that there is work to be done
Micah Shrewsberry knew what was coming to town after Michigan State lost to Northwestern on Sunday. The Spartans are a prideful team, led by a legendary head coach in Tom Izzo. They were not going to head on the road and lie down for the Penn State head coach and his team.
“I knew what was coming through this door,” Shrewsberry said. “I tried to heed that warning to our guys.”
Shrewsberry’s expectations came to reality. The Spartans walked out of the Bryce Jordan Center with a 67-58 win over the Nittany Lions.
More importantly for Penn State, it was a reminder that there is plenty of work to do for the Nittany Lions to get where they want to be this season and as a program.
The Spartans, after all, are what many programs aspire to be. They have the pride that goes with a winning tradition and lack of quit that is a staple of the best in the country and Izzo himself.
That is not an indictment of this Penn State team, but more of a gentle nudge that improvements need to be made. Some of that will come from changes in luck, like with the team’s shooting, but some of it will come from player development. Kebba Njie is the shining example of that. He’s a true freshman forward playing plenty of minutes in important games, but still has steps to take.
“It’s hard,” Shrewsberry said. “This is a hard league for a freshman to come in and play in that position. But he’s talented enough, he’s good enough, he’s gotta believe in himself. He’s gotta believe in himself. He’s gotta believe in the things that have gotten him here and when he makes mistakes he’s got to play through them.”
Some of those issues will resolve themselves.
Njie will likely be more confident as he continues to gain experience and play minutes against tough competition. He’ll get better on offense as he learns to play with teammates that have much less tread on their tires.
Eventually, he will be a much different player than he is right now, as almost all freshmen are after they grow.
For now, leaders like Jalen Pickett and Seth Lundy plan to make sure he’s ready to go mentally and that they aren’t the reason he hangs his head when he makes a mistake.
“He’s gonna be good for us in the future,” Lundy said. “It’s just one of those things. I’ve been a freshman here before. I know how it be, where you go in the game and you might do something that coach don’t like or something like that and you’ve got all 15 players saying something negative. It’s just one of those situations where everybody is saying something negative. We as a team have to do a better job of picking him up.”
Njie is far from the only reason the team lost. He isn’t even the main one.
The Nittany Lions love to shoot. They live by the three, and they die by the three.
Wednesday night they died by it, making only eight of their 27 attempts from beyond the arc, including no makes from Andrew Funk on his three attempts from deep. The senior guard is averaging almost three made 3-pointers per game on about seven attempts. That kind of performance is not characteristic of who he has shown to be this season, and one Pickett said he has to help him avoid.
“I feel like that’s my fault too a little bit,” Pickett said. “Funk is such a great shooter, I know people are going to be connected to him. So I’ve got to find him earlier, you know try and get him going a little bit, get his confidence growing. I’ll be better at that.”
Those improvements from the Nittany Lions should come, and they will likely look much better than they did against the Spartans in the future.
But there will surely be hemming and hawing that this program is the same that it always was even with a new head coach. There will be those who say “I told you so” after Shrewsberry pleaded for fans to pack the BJC for the game because he said his players deserved it.
They may be right in the end. This team may not break the 11-year NCAA Tournament drought and it may end up being just another Penn State men’s basketball team that gets lost to history as a bottom-of-the-Big Ten team.
But they may also be wrong, and there’s one important figure that was in State College on Sunday night that would surely say they will be better and that the right person is leading the program.
“They’re starting to do some things,” Izzo said. “This is great for Big Ten basketball because (Shrewberry is) going to do the job here. It’ll be to the point where those students that fill that football stadium, they’ll be filling this stadium. And when they do they’ll win even more games. ... You listen to him, you hear people talk about him, I’d be wrapping my arms around him if I was a Penn State fan because he’s got a good 20-year stretch here that he can be a hell of a coach.”
This story was originally published December 7, 2022 at 10:07 PM.
