Jeremy Fears Jr. had to learn to walk again. Tonight he put up 18 points and 11 assists against the second best team in college basketball. Michigan State beat Duke 79 to 73 in the Champions Classic. On December 20 of 2023 he was a freshman, twelve games into his first season, and he had gone home to Joliet, Illinois for winter break. He was hit in the left thigh. He had surgery. Then he had to be taught how to walk on that leg again. Tom Izzo puts the time he was gone at about eight months, and says that at the start of it he could not do almost anything. There were people around the program who thought he would never be the same. Jacob Cotsonika of Sports Illustrated got him talking about that stretch last November, and he has said much the same thing on the Big Ten Network. "It was taken away from me for nine months." "Basketball can be taken away from me, away from anyone, at any moment." Coen Carr, who scored nine for Michigan State tonight, has said that watching Fears come back made his own problems look smaller. The NCAA gave him the year back, so he is a redshirt sophomore now. This season KenPom has him first in the country in assist rate, ahead of every other guard in the sport. Tonight the game was at the United Center in Chicago, which is about 40 miles up the road from Joliet. He had eight assists by halftime. Duke came back and got it to five with two minutes left. Jordan Scott drove for a layup. Then Fears went to the line with 39 seconds on the clock and made two. It is the first time Michigan State has beaten Duke since December of 2020. In January of last year he played at Northwestern, 45 minutes from the house, and his family came. Nick Lundberg of NBC Sports asked him afterward what that had been like. "It was great actually, just being able to play at home in general." Tonight he did it again, in his own state, against the number two team in the country. #NBA #nbanews #nbabasketball #celtics #bostonceltics - @thesportsontap