Everybody in Michigan State’s locker room was in a good mood Tuesday evening. Tom Izzo was loudly yucking it up with Mateen Cleaves. Xavier Booker was enjoying answering questions about his career-high scoring night.
But nobody looked or sounded as genuinely happy as MSU's Szymon Zapala. The 7-foot transfer had just played a really good game in the Spartans’ 77-58 win over Oakland — and done so with his mom and dad there watching at Little Caesars Arena, seeing him play at MSU in person for the first time.
“They always watch. But having them here, it’s exciting. It’s just exciting,” Zapala said, his voice trailing off as he thought about it.
His parents, Ryszard and Jolanta, are staying with him in his East Lansing apartment, visiting for three weeks over the holidays from Zaborze, Poland, where they live in the same house Zapala grew up in.
“Especially with our schedule, 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there, I’m able to see them,” Zapala said. “It’s just all those little moments that mean a lot.”
Zapala’s father and older brother came to watch him play with the Spartans in Spain in August. But this is their first trip to Michigan and first time seeing his life at MSU. And he hadn’t seen his mother in more than a year.
“It is really hard,” Zapala said. “There’s sacrifices everywhere. So that’s my sacrifice. It gets hard. Especially during the holidays. That’s why they wanted to see me on Christmas, because this is a time where you (only) get one or two days off. You just have those memories from the past when we spent holidays all together.”
There's a good Hallmark movie script in there somewhere — "A Polish Christmas in East Lansing", perhaps. Zapala’s sacrifice to play collegiately in the United States has unquestionably worked out for him and for MSU this season.
Through 11 games, he’s averaging 5.4 points, 5.1 rebounds, a block and close to a full assist in 15.6 minutes per game as the Spartans’ starting center. It’s exactly the best-case-scenario MSU’s staff envisioned when they brought Zapala in after a productive season at Longwood, following three years at Utah State, where he played sparingly.
Tuesday against Oakland was an ideal performance — five points, eight rebounds, three on the offensive end, six blocks and three assists in 19 minutes.
Zapala's rim protection and rebounds stood out Tuesday, but so did his passing, with all three of his assists coming on passes from big man to big man — one back out to Booker for a 3-pointer and two interior feeds on the fly to Jaxon Kohler for layups.
“I feel like we have really good chemistry,” Kohler said. “Passing, that's such a good trait to have when it's big to big, especially against the zone. I feel like we both have played with each other long enough to understand where we're going to be.”
“We emphasized it a lot over the last few days that, this big-to-big connection is going to be big (during) this game,” Zapala said. “They play a very specific type of zone where these big-(to)-big passes can really hurt them, and I think they did today.”
It’s the sort of combo that takes two skilled big men, with good hands, who see the floor like guards — European-style big men. Zapala is one. Kohler has many of those traits offensively. It’s an added part of MSU’s arsenal that you don’t see very often in the college game.
Zapala was anything but a heralded transfer addition. But the player and the fit have turned out close to perfect for MSU, based on what the Spartans needed at the postion — real size, better hands and feel for the game, and someone whose role wouldn't clash with the development of MSU's other bigs.
We saw it all pretty well in concert on Tuesday — with Zapala, Kohler and Booker combining for 37 points, 24 rebounds, 10 blocked shots and five assists while eating up 61 of the 80 minutes at the center and power forward positions.
“It was very fun,” Zapala said. “I think it was my personal record with the blocks. But, I mean, I didn't really do anything special. I was just just trying to play, trying to win. So that was my role today. But it was exciting, because (my parents) got to see it, too.”
This story was originally published in the Lansing State Journal.