Michigan State's Durrell Summers is one of the most athletic players on his team. Summers is playing his best basketball of his career in leading the Spartans into the Final Four. Before the tournament started, Summers' was dogged by his coaches and teammates for what they described as a poor effort. This article explains how a team meeting helped Summers turn the corner and in turn helped the Spartans reach yet another Final Four. From the Detroit Free Press:
They do not always do things delicately at Michigan State, whether rebounding in bruising fashion or calling out a teammate for playing without enough passion.
Spartans guard Durrell Summers found out that second part after he had been acting as if he were overqualified to play defense.
Summers was benched in the second half of Michigan State’s loss to Minnesota in the Big Ten men’s basketball tournament. Asked if he was worried about Summers’s confidence, Coach Tom Izzo told Michigan State basketball beat reporters, “Confidence has nothing to do with guarding somebody.”
Michigan State’s players were no less blunt at a players-only meeting in which Summers faced a reckoning.
“We all said what we had to say to Durrell, and Durrell sat there and listened and took it like a man, if it was good or bad,” said Draymond Green, a sophomore forward.
Summers can be an explosive offensive player, but he yawned on defense and admitted that he only glanced at scouting reports and rarely absorbed them. He needed Izzo and his teammates to shake him up, and they did, for two days before the N.C.A.A. tournament started.
It was a reordering of Michigan State basketball, which has lost its leading scorer, Kalin Lucas, to injury but gained a star in Summers. A 6-foot-4 junior from Detroit, Summers made 8 of 10 shots and scored 21 points against Tennessee in a 70-69 victory in the Midwest Regional final Sunday to cap a splendid four-game stretch that helped carry Michigan State to the Final Four.
Summers was 1 for 5 in that Big Ten tournament game against Minnesota, but in four N.C.A.A. tournament games, he has made 30 of 54 shots from the field (55 percent) and averaged 20 points a game. He was named the most outstanding player in the Midwest Region.
Lucas, an all-Big Ten guard, ruptured an Achilles’ tendon in a second-round tournament game against Maryland, but now the Spartans are headed to the Final Four with a player who was helping to rupture the team in early March.
“Through the whole tournament, my defense was on a different level,” Summers said. “It actually has been able to translate to my offense; I am so focused in on defense that nothing can break my focus on offense.
“That was a matter of me having to look in a mirror seeing what Coach is asking of me. Coach was telling me you don’t realize how you rub off on other people.”
Izzo was determined not to let Summers skate through. The coach said he had had other players, gifted players, who got away from him without being pushed to their potential. Izzo had no choice, he said, but to push Summers to an uncomfortable edge.
“When you go through a couple of guys like that in the past and it didn’t work out for them, I kind of vowed I’ll never let that happen again,” Izzo said. “Sometimes, people take things casually. And I think a lot of players do. And I’ve probably been harder on him because I think he has more to give. You know, when you have more to give, people are going to push you even harder.”
After the Big Ten tournament, Summers said he started meeting with Izzo and going over ways to increase his value to the team. Naturally, it started with being more devoted to defense. What Summers discovered was that when he played harder on defense, his offense came easier.
On Sunday, he ruined Tennessee with his shooting. The Volunteers concentrated on bearing down on Lucas’s replacement, Korie Lucious, but the Spartans were able to swing the ball toward Summers, who stroked shot after shot. He made 4 of 6 3-pointers, the last one with 2 minutes 47 seconds remaining, giving the Spartans a 69-66 lead. It was Michigan State’s final field goal of the game, and Summers turned to the bench and saw Izzo wink at him as if the player and coach had arrived at the peak together.
“In the beginning, we didn’t understand each other as much,” Summers said. “We talked some things out. We had to. It was tournament time.
“He felt like there were some things I wasn’t doing up to my ability. I eventually saw that. We watched a lot of film together and discussed some things, and I acknowledged that and I have just been trying to be a different player, a different person.”
