DETROIT (97.1 The Ticket) -- He might only be a sophomore, but Michigan State forward Xavier Tillman has been around the game of basketball long enough to have seen a thing or two. He's not sure he's ever seen a player carry his team like Cassius Winston has.
In his younger days, Tillman did the heavy lifting himself.
"Growing up, it's always been me on a team like that. I've never witnessed somebody that really carried a team -- well, Miles last year. I think he averaged 18," Tillman said Saturday night following Michigan State's win over Michigan in which Winston posted a routine 23 points and seven assists. Then he looked across the locker room at Winston, who was sitting comfortably in the desk chair in front of his stall and putting on a pair of sneakers like he was ready to run back on the floor.
"But he's averaging like 20-something," Tillman went on. "He's responsible for so many points, probably 45, 50 percent of our points. If he's not scoring, he's assisting or he's making the pass to an assist."
Look no further than Saturday night, and forget the plays that elude the box score. Four of Winston's seven assists came on 3-pointers, which means he was directly responsible for 41 of the Spartans' 75 points -- well over half of their production. And that was the norm throughout Big Ten play, for almost all of which Winston was without one of his co-stars in Joshua Langford and for the final five games of which he was also without his other co-star in Nick Ward.
"We were playing without 30 points a game," Winston said.
So he upped his averages to 21.2 points and 8.8 assists over that last stretch, lifting the Spartans to their second straight Big Ten championship. On Monday, Winston was named Big Ten Player of the Year, which was a bit like finding out the basketball he dribbles is orange.
"He just took advantage of more opportunities that he had with those two guys being out," Tillman said. "And he just relished it."
(As for Miles Bridges last year -- who no doubt was terrific -- he was playing alongside the likes of Jaren Jackson Jr., Winston, Langford and Ward. That's a little different than the group of dudes Winston was running with this year.)
The Big Ten Player of the Year this season was supposed to be Purdue's Carsen Edwards -- at least, that was the preseason pick. And Edwards was Winston's competition insofar as well, the basketball mighttttt be pink. Winston said the award wasn't on his radar at the beginning of the year. It wasn't something he set out to win, until he realized he could.
And that's the thing with Winston. Where there's a sliver of an opening, there's a lane to the rack.
"Once they kind of put my name in there, I made up my mind that I was going to go after it. ... Had to be between the beginning and the middle of the Big Ten season," Winston said Saturday night. "I think the conference started talking about it, and I was like, 'They put the opportunity out in front of me, I'm going to do everything I can to go grab it.'"
Truth is, this has been Winston's award for a while. He was efficient as he was productive all season long, which is where he separated himself from Edwards. And he was much more than a scorer: His 7.6 assists per game ranked third in the nation. All told, Winston put up the type of season that few players of recent vintage have matched.
How few? Winston is one of two players in the past four years to average at least 19 points and seven assists and fewer than three turnovers per game. The other was ... Denzel Valentine in 2015-16, Michigan State's last Big Ten Player of the Year.
There was no denying Winston this award. It belonged to him weeks ago. In Tillman's eyes, Winston had it sewn up way back in January, when he put up a season-high 29 points plus six assists in a close win at Nebraska. It was Michigan State's seventh Big Ten game of the season, but Tillman already knew.
"He was carrying us. Maybe there was one before that, but for sure that's the one I remember," Tillman said. "He literally took the game over, especially in the first half. He just went to work, and we were just like, 'Give him the ball, get out the way. Set a screen for him, get out the way.' That's what it was.
"That was the time I noticed that, 'OK, yeah, he's the best player in this league.'"
Winston would prove it again and again over the next several weeks. His coronation came Saturday against Michigan. After a slow first half in which he was limited by foul trouble, he came alive for 16 points over the final 16 minutes, scoring in every which way. In the Spartans' 20-2 run that turned the game on its head, Winston had a hand in 14 points.
"Ice in his veins," Tillman smiled. "When the clutch time hits, we're like, 'Yo, go do your thing. Take over.'"
So maybe it's been "clutch time" since November. Or maybe since late December, after Langford went down for the year. Either way, Winston has taken over for the past few months, and on Monday he got the award he so clearly deserved.
By Will Burchfield