EAST LANSING, Mich. — The weeks Miles Bridges spent deciding whether to enter the 2017 NBA Draft were “more nerve-wracking than difficult,” because there never really was a decision to make. Bridges knew all along what he wanted: another year of college, another year of college basketball, another year with his Michigan State teammates.
The challenge was in convincing so many others who insisted his choice was reckless or foolish or ludicrous.
That included his coach, Tom Izzo.
How many times did Izzo insist to Bridges that he ought to leave — that he had to leave? When Bridges told Izzo he wished to return to Michigan State because he wanted to win an NCAA championship, you know what Izzo said? Sorry, can’t tell you — but it was along the lines of “I told him he’s full of it.”
Izzo worried what the consequences would be for Bridges if he passed on the opportunity to become a lottery pick after his freshman season. He worried about the consequences for the MSU basketball program if an elite recruit such as Bridges did not become a “one-and-done.”
Bridges is 6-7, 230 pounds. There are hints of Kawhi Leonard (toughness, length), Gordon Hayward (shooting), Terrence Ross (athleticism) and Trevor Booker (rebounding) in his game. Enough of all of that — and enough weaknesses, as well — that Bridges was told he would likely be picked anywhere from No. 8 to No. 14 in the 2017 NBA Draft.
“I’ve got people telling me. 'Well, you know, you’ve got to push him out,'” Izzo told Sporting News.
This was not a typical player-coach circumstance. Coaches generally don’t cajole elite players to leave their teams, and players generally don’t look at the promise of becoming a multi-millionaire and decide it can wait. This curiosity percolated for several weeks following the end of the Spartans’ 2016-17 season in the second round of the NCAA Tournament, with Bridges trying very hard not to take Izzo’s position personally and with Izzo questioning his own intelligence.
Then came the evening of April 12, when Michigan State held its annual Academic Excellence Gala: one of the coach’s favorite events each year, only he wasn’t able to enjoy this one quite as much. Because when it was over, and after Bridges left a church service in which teammate Lourawls "Tum Tum" Nairn addressed the congregation, Izzo picked up his freshman star for a come-to-Jesus meeting as they drove through the Michigan State campus late into the night.
Izzo drew a line: No more, "I want to win a championship, I want to be Big Ten player of the year, I want to see my jersey hung next to those of Magic Johnson and Greg Kelser and Mateen Cleaves." If Bridges desired another year at Michigan State, he'd better have a hell of a reason. And Bridges gave him one.
“He says, ‘You know what, Coach? I want to get better. I don’t want to be in the D-League. I’ve got buddies that are, and I just want to make sure when I go, I’m ready,’ ” Izzo recalled to Sporting News. “I looked at him and I said, ‘Done deal.’ For me, that was a done deal. It was a reasonable, sensible argument.”
Eventually, though, Bridges would have to tell his mother.
*****
Agents, friends, reporters, scouts, acquaintances, fans, strangers and family members — oh and, as we said, coaches — all had one opinion about how Bridges should spend the next year of his life. Miles had another, opposing, viewpoint.
That might seem like a lonely place to be.
“I never felt alone because I had my teammates,” Bridges told SN during an interview at MSU’s basketball meeting room. “Josh Langford and Tum Tum, they were always by my side. They were with me no matter what, and I knew I could fall back on them. They’re really like brothers to me.”
Nairn is from the Bahamas, by way of Sunrise Christian Academy in Kansas. Langford is from Alabama. Bridges is from up the road in Flint, though he spent some of teenaged years playing prep school ball in West Virginia. How three young men from such disparate backgrounds could grow so close in such a short time is difficult to explain. “Something just clicked,” Langford told SN, and that seems a sufficient answer.
Bridges and Langford roomed together as freshmen. They did not have a television, so they’d often spend their time talking, which inevitably led to a discussion of Bridges’ plans for the draft. It was a short conversation, and never revisited.
“I was like, ‘Whatever you do, I’m going to support you,'” Langford said. “‘If you leave, you’ll be fine. Whatever you do, it’s your decision. I’m not going to tell you whether to stay or leave because it’s not my decision, but you have my support 100 percent because I’m your brother.’
“Throughout the whole situation, the whole process, I felt like me and Tum were just two people he could really lean on.”
Bridges comes from a large family: three sisters and a brother, but they are older. Having a couple of teammates closer in age and experience became valuable at a challenging time.
Nairn was particularly helpful, because he knew all along what Bridges wanted his next step to be. “He told me. A long time ago,” Nairn said. “I don’t want to say exactly. Just say it was a long time ago.”
Although Bridges had an established preference, it wasn’t easy to get to that point.
“Once my mom was kind of getting on me about going — that was when I was thinking that maybe I should go,” Bridges told SN. “But it was always something in my heart that told me to stay. I had bigger plans this year, a bigger purpose this year.”
He started small toward that end. He woke up at 6:30 a.m. during the summer to lift weights. There was the team practice once a week, as much skill work as he could stand and one-on-one games and pickup ball in the afternoon.
In summer school, he took a class called “History of Sport” that sounded more fun than it turned out to be. They studied hockey, how it became an Olympic sport and so popular in Canada. Basketball was saved for near the end of the term. Bridges allowed that it was interesting, but also had “a lot of reading to do to get a good grade on the quiz.”
This is what he wants his life to be at the moment. He generally takes four classes in a full semester, and he got back at it at the start of the fall semester. Regular practice for the 2017-18 basketball season commenced about a month later. Now, the regular season is here.
“It’s just the freedom that you have” Bridges said. “You have freedom in the real world, but you also have responsibilities. Some of your responsibilities are handled here at college: Meals, you don’t have to worry about. You do have to worry about keeping your apartment clean — but not having your own house, having your own car. I can walk around everywhere here. I’m not in a hostile environment. The environment here is second to none. Going off to the city, I know there are going to be people that think differently than me, that don’t want me to succeed.
"Everybody here wants me to succeed.”
*****
If Bridges is going to make another lap around the college circuit worth his time, it's essential he improves as a player. Merely getting older, maybe a little stronger, is not enough.
“A lot of the skills still aren’t there yet,” said Ed Isaacson, former draft analyst for NBC Sports. “If anyone is going to give that to him, it’s going to be Coach Izzo and his staff. I would have expected him to make the move, but I’m glad with the situation he’s in he realized what he has on his side and decided to come back.”
Bridges must improve as an individual defender. As dynamic as he is, as physically gifted as he is, this should be a strength.
He needs to improve as a ball-handler so that he’s not just a player who dunks and shoots 3-pointers. He must be able to get past defenders and score on pull-ups or get all the way to the rim. To that end, he plays regularly against Nairn — a quick, gutsy 5-10 point guard known for his defensive intensity.
“I try to take it from him, and he’s just got to keep the ball low, keep it out in front of him,” Nairn said. “A lot of us have a tendency to keep the ball at our sides, and coach Iz tells us to push it out in front where the defense can’t get it.
“He knows that he’s the best player in the country. There’s nobody in the country that can do what he does. I just think he’s got to stay in attack mode for us every single time, offensively and defensively.”
Bridges’ freshman year was not precisely the experience he imagined when he signed to join the Spartans as the centerpiece of Izzo’s most celebrated recruiting class. It began as a sort of spectacular disappointment, with 21 points and 7 rebounds in a 2-point loss to Arizona, and ended much the same way. Bridges averaged 16.9 points and 8.3 rebounds for a team that squeezed into the NCAA Tournament, routed Miami (Fla.) in an 8/9 game and then pushed No. 1 seed Kansas for 25 minutes before yielding 90 points in a double-digit defeat. The Spartans wound up with a 20-15 record.
Along the way, Bridges missed seven games with an ankle injury. Four of the team’s top 11 players missed extensive time, including bigs Gavin Schilling and Ben Carter, who were out the entire year.
That Michigan State would be loaded up for a run at a national championship this season influenced Bridges' decision. Schiling and Carter will play, big Nick Ward could be a force, guard Cassius Winston has a chance at a strong sophomore season. If the Spartans were likely to stink, even with a potential double-double lottery-pick forward in the lineup, Bridges might have been less inclined to return.
Izzo, though, felt compelled to remind Bridges that chasing a championship in college can be a capricious pursuit. In 2015, an MSU team that went 23-11 in the regular season and earned a No. 7 NCAA seed took great advantage of some upsets in its region to wind up in the Final Four along with three elite teams in Kentucky, Duke and Wisconsin, which had lost a combined eight games all season. In 2016, an MSU team that went 29-5 in the regular season, won the Big Ten Tournament and earned a No. 2 seed lost its first NCAA Tournament game.
Chris Stone, who covers the NBA draft for Sporting News, projects Bridges will be selected No. 7 next June. But there will be draft snipers out there just waiting for any hint that Bridges’ decision to return — maybe he gets injured, or doesn’t have a great season — might lead to a drop in his projected draft position. Those people never are conspicuous when someone such as Frank Kaminsky accelerates from borderline first-rounder to lottery pick with an extra year in college. But they cackle when an Ivan Rabb falls into the second round. Bridges will be their test case for 2018.
Will any of them attempt to understand, though, why Bridges still is a Spartan?
“I want to be mentally physically almost at the peak of my game when I go to the draft,” Bridges said. “I want to go to a team and be there to play. I want to become more of a man, because I know there’s going to be a lot more responsibility for me. I don’t want to make any childish decisions, get in trouble. I want to know myself better.”
*****
All the energy Bridges expended convincing Izzo his return to East Lansing was not lunacy was important in that there still was one essential person who had to buy into the plan. That was the woman who began this process 19 years ago, by giving birth to Bridges.
“When I was balancing things out and doing the pros and cons with my mom, I felt like I needed him on my side,” Bridges said. “Because he knew I had to be strong to tell my mom no. When he says he supports his players, he really does. I wouldn’t say he was going against my mom, but he was supporting me. He wanted me to make the best decision, after I told him that I really wanted to stay.”
Cynthia Bridges told SN she is proud Miles made his own decision, but she had expected all along he would be leaving for the NBA after one year at MSU. That was the scenario presented to her by pretty much every college coach who had recruited him, she said, including Izzo and Kentucky’s John Calipari.
That required Miles to play well, of course, but he had been named the Big Ten Freshman of the Year and won in the NCAA Tournament.
“I said, ‘I would go,’ Cynthia Bridges said. “I was watching the draft, and I’d see some of the guys Miles played better than them, and they’re there. But, you know, God has a plan. And I found out Miles prayed and God told him to stay another year. Me, I would have left.
“I’ve always heard he’s one-and-done. Coach Izzo said he would be one-and-done here. ‘I will not hold him back.’ That’s all I was thinking," she said. "I thought Miles thought that, too, but evidently he didn’t.
“Miles loves God, and he definitely follows what God tells him to do. Because I was telling him he should go to the NBA and he was, 'Forget my mom. I’m going to follow you, God.'”
There was a moment toward the end of the season when Miles was picking up a bag for a senior teammate. Izzo teased Bridges, saying that would be the last time he’d be doing that at MSU — that he’d be off in the NBA next year. And finally Miles had to respond: Why do you keep saying that?
This might have been the most pleasant predicament Izzo ever encountered as a coach: He couldn’t get rid of Miles Bridges.
A big-time agent told Izzo, “If you don’t send him out of here, you’re going to have trouble getting another player. Yeah, I should do that if I’m worried about me,” Izzo said. “But who are we supposed to be worried about in this deal?
“How do I win on this thing? You know how I win? This is a great kid who did what he wants to do.”
This article was originally published on July 31, 2017 and has been updated with current information.
