What MSU's Cooper Said After Key Performance vs. Purdue
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WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. --- Thursday night felt like one of the peaks of Carson Cooper's four-year career at Michigan State.
The Jackson, Mich. native whom MSU's Tom Izzo and Doug Wojcik pulled off the IMG Academy B team as a zero-star recruit has slowly gotten better and better and better over his time in East Lansing. All that work from Cooper beared fruit, as he scored 15 points (6-for-9 shooting) while grabbing six rebounds during the 13th-ranked Spartans 76-74 upset win at No. 8 Purdue.
"It's up there," Cooper said after the game when asked where this win ranks in his career. "I think, Big Ten wins, it's probably top-two, for sure. I think [it's even better than] my early years, winning at Michigan. There's a history of us not being super successful here at Mackey [Arena].
"Obviously, the environment, it's like the [Breslin Center]. It's a top-three environment hardest environment to play in in the country. So this one feels really good, but we're not gonna --- I feel like Coach [Izzo] probably told [the media] --- but we're gonna feel really good about it for the next five hours, and then we're gonna think about Indiana."
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More Thoughts on Cooper
The development of Cooper continues to be outstanding during his time at Michigan State. He began his career as a freshman essentially just trying to take advantage of any minutes he could get. There were games where Cooper was a DNP, and sometimes it didn't seem certain that the Cooper experiment would work out.
In a credit to Cooper's will, he stuck it out. A lot of guys in his position would have transferred elsewhere after any of his first three seasons with the team. As a junior last year, he accepted a bench role that offered up 17 minutes per game; not many upperclassmen would be OK with that.
Izzo has said a few times that he regrets not redshirting Cooper as a freshman a little bit, because it certainly seems like there is still some things that can be unlocked in Cooper's game. He's just going to have to do it at the professional level.
This version of Cooper is still very effective, though. He had an efficient offensive night, highlighted by a nice spin move in the post that led to a ferocious dunk, but he also had a better night defensively. Cooper kept senior Purdue big man Trey Kaufman-Renn in check most of the night, holding him to 10 points. He also had a nice contest on a Kaufman-Renn shot in the final moments, getting MSU one of its three straight stops to end the game and get the win.
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A 2025 graduate from Michigan State University, Cotsonika brings a wealth of experience covering the Spartans from Rivals and On3 to his role as Michigan State Spartans Beat Writer on SI. At Michigan State, he was also a member of the world-renowned Spartan marching band for two seasons.
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