EAST LANSING, Mich. — The significance of the moment wasn’t lost on Jeremy Fears on Tuesday night.

After he’d hounded Indiana guard Conor Enright into a turnover near midcourt, Michigan State’s point guard turned his steal into a one-man fast break and then did what came naturally. The 6-foot-2 junior launched himself toward the basket off his left leg and finished with a two-handed dunk that brought the Breslin Center crowd to its feet.

“That might be my first real dunk here,” Fears said later, smiling, after he’d sparked his team’s 81-60 runaway win over the Hoosiers.

And that’s no small feat for Fears, who two years ago wasn’t entirely sure what his basketball future would look like. Back then, he was just beginning months of rehabilitation after having a bullet removed from the femur in his left leg, the scary remnants of a shooting in his hometown of Joliet, Illinois, in December 2023.

Even when Fears returned to his starting role as a sophomore last season, he hadn’t fully recovered some of the athleticism and explosiveness that were crucial parts of his floor game. But after a full summer of work, it’s obvious he’s “feeling like my old self again,” as he put it Tuesday night.

“And it just feels good to be able to go up there and dunk off one leg,” he said. “It took me some time. Last year, I could barely jump off that leg.”

Top form

This year, it’s Fears’ play that has jump-started No. 12 Michigan State, now 15-2 overall and just a game behind Nebraska atop the Big Ten standings. Tuesday night was merely the latest example, as Fears scored a career-high 23 points — 19 in the first half — and added a game-high 10 assists to record his fourth double-double of the season.

Combined with his tone-setting defensive intensity, particularly early in the game, and the way Fears pushed the pace all night for the Spartans, head coach Tom Izzo said, “All in all, I thought that was one of Jeremy’s best games.”

He got no arguments from his Indiana counterpart, Darian DeVries, whose team made a game of it for 30 minutes before finally withering down the stretch.

“I thought (Fears’) ability in transition to get from point A to B, when we weren't able to get him under control, was a problem for us,” DeVries said. “He was really dynamic in that way. Either off of turnovers, long shots, whatever, if you can't get him slowed down early, it's really hard.”

And that’s really where it has to start for this Michigan State team, which relies on those familiar Izzo staples — aggressive defense, tenacious rebounding and incessant running — to get ahead and stay there.

"When we do it right, when Jeremy pushes it like he's been doing, we can be an effective team,” said Izzo, whose team doubled up the Hoosiers both on the glass and in fast-break points. “We're getting better. It’s just slowly. I’d like to speed it up a little.”

That’s a message he delivers to his point guard almost daily, too, whether it’s in practice or in film sessions or even during media timeouts and at halftime like it was again Tuesday night. As Izzo joked after the game, “I said to him, ‘If you ever question me again about not pushing the ball …”

“It’s really not a skill,” Fears said, nodding. “It’s more of a choice. Just push the ball every time — that’s something I can do and something I can control. So I try to do that as much as possible. And good things obviously happen.”

Things like that dunk of his, sure. But it's also those transition 3s from Kur Teng late in the first half. Or Cam Ward's and-1 layup and Coen Carr's highlight-reel slam in that decisive 19-0 run that had the Breslin rocking and the Hoosiers reeling.

“You can’t give them transition, especially here,” DeVries sighed. “That's where the game just flipped.”

Not an outside threat

Fears ended up playing 34 minutes Tuesday, and Izzo probably extended his night an extra minute or two so that he could get that elusive 10th assist, which came on an alley-oop to Carson Cooper with 2:35 left. That's the seventh game with double-digit assists this season for Fears, who ranks second nationally in assists per game (8.8), trailing only Purdue’s Braden Smith (9.8). He actually leads the country in assist rate, too, setting up more than half (50.9%, per KenPom) of his team’s field goals when he’s on the floor. Tuesday, that assist rate was a whopping 70%.

But he also asserted himself as a scorer early in this game, recording the Spartans’ first 10 points and 17 of their first 21 against the Hoosiers. That wasn’t by design, but more out of necessity from Fears, who made his first 3-point attempt Tuesday and then missed a handful more. He’s shooting 27.1% from 3 on the season, including 1 or 17 in Big Ten play.

“Yeah, don't fuel his fire,” Izzo said, chuckling. “I mean, I need him offensively, and I love what he did. But he’s still not a 3-point shooter. He's getting better at it, but I think what he did is he defended a lot better and ran our break a lot better, and that's why he got a double-double.”

And that’s why he’ll keep pushing him to do more of the same.

“When the head dies, the body dies — and he is our head,” Izzo said. “So the better he plays, the better we play.”

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