Blue White Illustrated

LASTING IMPACT PSU hopes to parlay its big season into ongoing success on March 7, a game in which the last-place Wildcats shot 55.7 per- cent from the floor in the second half to pull away. So while Jones was back in the lineup by season's end, the Lions never regained the mo- mentum they had built up earlier in the year. "You need a little bit of luck, and we were a little bit unlucky," Cham- bers said. "But man, these guys re- ally stepped up and did some great things. That shows you the depth of our team, and that team still needs to get better. There is a better team within this team, I know it. We've just got to get M.J. going." Despite their late-season fade, the Nittany Lions headed to the Big Ten tournament without having to make an improbable title run to win their way into the NCAA tourney. They proved themselves worthy during the regular season, and as a result, Chambers went into the postseason feeling confident about the Lions' potential. "It's about us," he said. "It's about the process of getting better and doing what we need to do to be the best we can be." In a season of unparalleled com- petitiveness in the Big Ten, as many as 11 programs were well within reach of NCAA bids heading into the league tournament. The diffi- culty of the conference schedule they had navigated helps explain why Chambers was feeling upbeat about his program's postseason po- tential despite its late-season mis- steps. "I had a staff meeting yesterday and I reminded everybody that we are an NCAA tournament team," Chambers said. "We put up a calen- dar and said NCAA tournament se- lection show Sunday. So we're a really good team. "It's March, man. It's March and you're playing a meaningful game. How fun is that? Man, that's excit- ing. Really exciting stuff. Historical year. Now we've got to finish it." ■ O f its Big Ten opponents, Penn State has defeated Michigan State less fre- quently than any other. For 10 years, from January 1997 until January 2007, the Nittany Lions won just once in 17 tries. Their only victory during that span was a two-point win in the Big Ten tour- nament in 2001. A perennial power under the direction of head coach Tom Izzo, the Spartans earned a national title in 2000. They've made eight Final Four appearances, while also winning six Big Ten tourna- ment championships and nine regular- season titles. So when Patrick Chambers took over Penn State's program in 2011, he didn't need to search long to find a team worth emulating. "I looked at one program, and one pro- gram only: I looked at Tom Izzo and Michigan State," Chambers said during Penn State's most recent trip to East Lansing. "I said, that's the way I want to play. I want to play tough, I want to play physical. … We want to score the ball, we want to defend, we want to rebound, we want to do all those things. "I'm not ashamed to admit that and give him some credit for how we're starting to play and how we've started to build and with the players who all de- cided to come here. Recruiting is getting better. But as a culture and program stands, we have to do this every single day." Chambers' enthusiasm was easy to understand. That trip in February pro- duced a 75-70 victory at the Breslin Center. Prior to that game, the Nittany Lions had topped the Spartans just once in Chambers' nine-year tenure, a 72-63 win at the Palestra in Philadelphia in January 2017. This year's win was only Penn State's second in 28 trips to East Lansing. The victory also extended PSU's win- ning streak to five games, a streak that eventually topped out at eight. The Nit- tany Lions won at Purdue's Mackey Arena for only the third time, breaking a nine-game losing streak to the Boiler- makers. And they later got their first win at Nebraska since the Cornhuskers joined the Big Ten. Even after a late-season slide in which the Lions lost five of their final six games heading into the conference tourna- ment, the team secured its first winning Big Ten season since 2008-09. All of this came during a campaign in which most preseason prognostications had Penn State needing to battle to avoid the depths of the Big Ten. "We were picked at the bottom," Chambers said. "Let's not lose sight of the big picture. The macro of this is pretty exciting, what we're doing. That's what I told the staff. So let's go out, let's get better, let's have some fun again in the last few weeks." The key for the Nittany Lions, some- thing that has repeatedly come up in postgame interviews and other media appearances, is the determination to maintain the program's momentum into next season and beyond. Given Penn State's bleak basketball history – it has reached the NCAA tournament a mere four times since 1965 – the chal- lenge is understood to be a tall one. But after witnessing fundamental shifts in the team's mentality this season, Chambers is optimistic about the fu- ture. "Our guys believe that we can win every game. I don't know if that was the case over the last eight years," he said. "They're that dejected in the locker A N A L Y S I S B Y N A T E B A U E R

• Cover