Valentine’s Day is going to have a second coming this year, and it will happen April 4th down in Houston to be exact. That’s when the Michigan State Spartans are going to be crowned the next NCAA Men’s Basketball National Champions, and Denzel Valentine, their do-it-all All-American guard, will be the main reason why.
In this season of parody in which everyone has already beaten and been beaten by everybody else, and twice on Sundays, it should be no surprise to see a veteran Tom Izzo’s team once again march back to East Lansing with the madness in their hands. Izzo, by now a practicing member of the final four firm, having passed the bar long ago, is one more championship and six more tournament victories away from being asked to become a partner in the firm.
So he has to know what he is shooting for, and he must know what an opportunity he has with this latest bunch of blue chips. What he has is everything for which the recipe for a national championship calls. All the clichés are there. Senior leadership and experience? Check. Defense and rebounding? Check. Exceptional guard play? Check? Three-point shooting? Check. The prerequisite growing pains slash adversity to have overcome? Check and check. All of those essential traits, plus a splash of super-slick passing to add some spice, are encompassed to a T in Mr. Valentine.
20 points per game to go along with over 7 assists and seven rebounds, Denzel Valentine does much more than a little bit of everything for the Spartans. Each and every game, time and again Michigan State players find themselves with the ball in their hands and an open shot before the defense can even react. His teammates are expecting such passes because he throws them every day in practice, but opponents are left flummoxed wondering what just happened. Such are the state of Valentine’s thread-the-needle, I-didn’t-see-that-coming passes.
Over the course of his four years here in Big T14N country, we’ve watched Denzel Valentine grow from a fresh-faced, roll-playing, fill-in-the-gap glue-guy who is willing to defend, screen, pass, rebound, and do all the dirty little things, all the while content to let others get the credit for the work, into a full-blown star with a statistical line similar to another Spartan who went by the name of Magic, and just like Magic, this guy too is ready to carry his team to glory come tournament time.
From beginning to end, Valentine has been more important for his team than any other player has for any other team all season long. From beginning to end, except for that injury of his which sent his team into a mini tailspin, who else has been as entertaining as Denzel Valentine? He has been the most exciting player to watch all season long. He’s been Buddy Hield, but with skills beyond scoring which elevate his teammates; he’s been Ben Simmons, but with higher caliber ammunition in those teammates, whom he makes better just by sharing the court with them, and a much higher powered, more accurate gun to fire them off in Coach Izzo.
Valentine is his trigger. He makes it all go. When Tom Izzo has had a healthy Denzel Valentine in his holster this season, the Spartans have been deadly, like best team in the country deadly. The team that topped Kansas at the beginning of the season, and the team that dismantled Big T14N champ Indiana a few weeks ago, is the team that will go all the way come March and on into early April, right into Valentine’s Day.