The Iowa men’s basketball team will battle Michigan State on Thursday at 6 p.m. in East Lansing. The contest will be televised on FS1.

The Spartans check in at 13-7 and 5-4 in the Big Ten while the Hawkeyes are 12-7 on the year and 4-4 in conference play. 

A large part of Michigan State’s success so far this season, Iowa head coach Fran McCaffery said, has been the Spartan’s backcourt tandem of senior Tyson Walker and junior A.J. Hoggard.

“I think he has played about as well as anybody I’ve seen on tape,” McCaffery said of Walker on a Wednesday Zoom press conference. “[He has] a great deal of confidence, [he is] scoring the ball at a high clip. I think the development of Hoggard has been a big part of that. “

“I thought Hoggard was good last year, I think he’s becoming elite,” McCaffery continued. “So now, Walker can play off the ball and sometimes he has it. But he can go get buckets. I mean, he can score the ball at a number of different levels and get to the rim. He’s got a serious pull-up game, he can make threes. And he’s a late-game shotmaker. So those two guys together, I think have been really good for that team. But they’ve also been really good together.”

Walker and Hoggard are averaging 14.2 and 12.9 points per game, respectively — up from 8.2 and 7.0 a season ago. 

Hoggard also contributes 6.1 assists per game, good for second in the Big Ten.

To stop the dynamic duo, McCaffery said his team will have to do a better job defensively than it did in the loss at Ohio State when the Hawkeyes surrendered a season-high 93 points. 

RELATED: Iowa men’s basketball ends winning streak in loss to Ohio State

“They were running their stuff at their pace,” McCaffery said of the Buckeyes. “They were mixing up penetration and post-ups. And they were going back and getting their missus so you know, you got to disrupt the rhythm. They were in a really good rhythm, and we didn’t do anything to disrupt that at all.”

McCaffery said, however, Iowa has taken an on-to-the-next-one approach and has been working diligently in practice to correct the defensive and rebounding issues that led to the loss in Columbus. Iowa lost the second-half rebounding battle, 21-10. 

“They’ve been really professional as I would have expected them to be,” McCaffery said of his team. We were not as connected at either end of the floor, that was obvious … We’re not a team that gets out-rebounded like that, in particular, in 20 minutes. We played OK for a while, we hung in there. We made a couple of runs, you know, we kept cutting it to eight. Couldn’t get it under eight. And you gotta learn from it. This is a mature group, and I think their approach has been really good.”

In Joe Lunardi’s latest Bracketology, Iowa was an 8 seed and Michigan State was a 6.