If Michigan State doesn't make the NCAA tournament next month, the Spartans will look back on this current three-game losing streak and kick themselves for squandered opportunities.

Nobody expected them to win at Ohio State last week, and after falling behind 20 points at halftime nobody figured a comeback was in the works. But there the Spartans were, a bucket away from winning in the final minutes and they couldn't get a shot to fall. Well, they did get one shot to fall, a 3-pointer by Maurice Joseph, but it was nullified by a moving screen call and Joseph and Drew Neitzel missed good looks down the stretch.

As any coach will tell you, missing shots is excusable. What cost the Spartans wins Tuesday at Illinois and Saturday in the rematch with Ohio State is not. For a team that's supposed to be built on grit and hustle and blue-collar play, MSU sure didn't show much of it in a few crucial stretches in each game. Against Illinois, with the Illini missing free throw after free throw to keep the Spartans in the game, MSU failed to box out on a crucial miss. Illinois grabbed the rebound and went on to score and put the game away. Yesterday, another offensive board on a missed free throw came back to bite the Spartans when they had a chance to take the lead.

"We worked on (boxing out on free throws) yesterday, day before and three different times during our walk-through today," MSU coach Tom Izzo said. "(Assistant coach Jim Boylen) looked at me like I was on drugs to say, what are you doing? I said we should have done it one more time because those kind of plays when you're a team that has very little margin for error are critical."

And that's exactly what MSU is entering its seven-game, season-ending stretch that begins Wednesday at Purdue. In all likelihood, the Spartans need to go 4-3 to make the NCAA tournament. That means sweeping their remaining home games or, considering they host No. 2 Wisconsin, more likely stealing one on the road (Wednesday's game and a Feb. 27 date in Ann Arbor are the most winnable).

"We definitely got to win some games now," guard Drew Neitzel said. "We knew this was going to be a really tough stretch with Ohio State twice, at Illinois, at Purdue, Wisconsin coming up twice, Michigan twice. We're in these games, we just got to do those little things to get over the hump and get the wins."