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EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Coach Tom Izzo believes his team learns more from a loss to a ranked opponent than an easy win against a lightweight.Perhaps so, but Michigan State needs to start collecting victories.The No. 13 Spartans lost a buzzer-beater to No. 10 Arizona in the Armed Forces Classic at Honolulu, Hawaii on Friday, then got dismantled by No. 2 Kentucky 69-48 in the Champions Classic at New Yorks Madison Square Garden on Tuesday.The level of opposition drops considerably on Friday when the Spartans (0-2) face winless Mississippi Valley State at the Breslin Center. The Delta Devils have lost their first three games by an average of 34 points.Izzo isnt surprised his team is winless at this stage, considering that freshmen are playing prominent roles.Teams are beating (opponents) by 30 and getting a false feeling of where they are really at, Izzo told media outlets. I told my guys, Youre gonna get exposed. But we look at two-thirds of that (Kentucky) game and say, OK, we played pretty good. We took a couple of punches in the mouth and hung in there.Michigan States defense was not the issue against the Wildcats. It held Kentucky to 38.3 percent shooting but couldnt get into any flow with its half-court offense. The Spartans shot 32.8 percent from the field, made just five of 26 3-point tries, missed six of nine free throws and committed 20 turnovers. Kentucky turned those giveaways into 24 points, while Michigan State scored only four fast-break points.Were a little tired. Were a little worn out, Izzo said of the cross-country travel. Weve got to get back to the drawing board as coaches and do a better job with the execution.Swingman Miles Bridges, the Spartans most highly touted newcomer, had a brutal night in New York. He scored six points on 2-for-11 shooting and committed nine turnovers.Izzo believes Bridges will benefit in the long run from that experience.Miles Bridges is one of the most coachable great players, Izzo told the Detroit News. He still competed, didnt hang his head -- but he did struggle and got his butt kicked. But good players self-evaluate and get better from it, where if he scored 30 points against Sisters of the Poor, it wouldnt have mattered.Bridges is still the only Spartan averaging double figures at 13.5 points per game.Senior guard Eron Harris, the Spartans top returning scorer, needs to rediscover his offensive touch after being a non-factor the first two games. Hes averaging nearly as many turnovers (3.5) as points (4.5).Mississippi Valley State, a Southwestern Athletic Conference club, has offered little resistance in its three losses. The Delta Devils fell to another Big Ten team, Northwestern, in its opener 94-63. They were subsequently blown out by West Virginia 107-66 and Kent State 93-63.Senior guard Marcus Romain is the teams leading scorer at 12.7 points per game. Romain averaged 18.6 points last season. Senior guard Isaac Williams is the only other player averaging double digits at 10.3.Mississippi Valley State lost its first 14 games last season and finished with an 8-27 record.Greg Little Jersey . Jason Zucker and Matt Cooke also scored for Minnesota, which has won five of six. Kuemper made five saves in the first, nine in the second, and nine in the third. The rookies best save came with 2:17 left in the third period when he denied former Wild forward Matt Cullen from just outside of the crease on the right side. Luke Kuechly Youth Jersey . The team also announced Tuesday that the Braves will wear a commemorative patch on the right sleeve during the season. The patch, shaped like home plate, carries the number 715, Aarons autograph and a "40th Anniversary" banner. http://www.thepanthersofficialstore.com/authentic-curtis-samuel-panthers-jersey/ . -- Ryan Blaney provided more evidence that Penske Racings No. Ryan Kalil Youth Jersey . Ouellette, from Montreal, already has three Olympic gold medals since joining the team in 1999. Sam Mills Panthers Jersey .C. at the helm of the top team in the Eastern Conference. His tenure as the GM in Vancouver was all too brief. Though he led the Canucks to what was then a franchise record-shattering campaign in just his second season, Nonis was gone and replaced one year later.RIO DE JANEIRO -- Even if only for two weeks, can Faster-Higher-Stronger overpower deadlier, scarier and bloodier? Can the Olympic Games still offer the world momentary levity, distract from terror, shootings, poverty and other worries in globally grim times? If not, what use is the multibillion-dollar celebration of youthful endeavor and mostly niche sports?Through no fault of their own, the athletes who will march in massed, joyful ranks behind their nations flags in Friday nights opening ceremony for the first Olympic Games in South America shoulder expectations beyond their own ambitions for gold, silver, bronze and personal bests.No Olympics in recent memory has opened under so many dark clouds, both within recession-battered Brazil and beyond. Headliners Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps are back for more medals. But no feat of theirs, or the other 10,500 Olympians, between the first medal awards on Saturday and the Aug. 21 closing ceremony will paste over recent horrors of 84 people murdered with a truck in Nice or the shooting massacre of 49 people in a Florida nightclub. Sports are, and always will be, trivial compared to such atrocities that have come depressingly thick and fast of late.The Olympics may help me take my mind off things, said Parisian lawyer Remy Durand, reflecting over lunch Thursday on the Champs-Elysees. But its not going to change my overall mood lastingly, after the attacks in recent weeks and months in France.Yet Olympic organizers cant be faulted for trying, with their Together we can change the world slogan and OlympicPeace hashtag. Cold War boycotts aside, the games remain a symbol of global togetherness, even if an increasingly commercialized one. By putting religion and politics aside, the Olympics still can remind the worlds people of their shared humanity, not their divisions.Picture Berlin in 1936, when white German long jumper Luz Long bonded with black American Jesse Owens when Adolf Hitler wanted to peddle racial supremacy. Or Sydney in 2000, when athletes from North and South Korea walked together behind one flag in the opening ceremony, momentarily putting aside more than half a century of enmity. Or Barcelona in 1992, when white South African Elana Meyer ran over to plant a kiss on Ethiopias Derartu Tulu. Meyer had won silver to Tulus gold in the 10,000 meters to become her countrys first post-apartheid individual medalist.On Friday, at the opening gala of these Olympics at Rios Maracana Stadium, 10 refugee athletes will march as one team behind the white Olympic flag -- a reminder to the world that they arent solely defined by their lack of a place to call home. While not as grand as opening ceremonies past, Rio still expects to wow.The Athens ceremony was classic, and Beijing was grand, was musical. London was quite smart. Were going to be cool, said creative director Fernando Meirelles.Still, the games have their naysayers. Doping scandals -- from sprinter Ben Johnson losing his 1988 Olympic gold medal over steroids to Russias recent state-organized subversion of anti-doping efforts -- have stained all Olympians andd heightened cynicism of their feats and worth.ddddddddddddOn behalf of all of this summers competitors, a Brazilian athlete will pledge at the opening ceremony that they will compete without doping and without drugs, in the true spirit of sportsmanship. The same promise has been made at all games since 2000 but may ring false among fans, especially with Russias flag fluttering among the others; the International Olympic Committee rejected calls for a blanket ban on all Russian athletes. The IOC, as it has in the past, will store some 4,500 drug-test samples to be taken during these games, so they can be thawed out and retested in years to come.Then theres the expense of the games. Big spending and the waste of unused venues in ex-host cities have forced Olympic organizers onto the defensive and left them with a shrinking pool of taxpayers willing to foot the bills. The $10 billion to $12 billion spent on Rios games should have gone to better causes in a city rife with poverty, critics say.After Rio, the Olympics rumble to Tokyo in 2020, leaving Rio de Janeiros 6.5 million people -- the racially mixed, socially divided Cariocas -- with the same concerns the world was largely oblivious to before the Olympic echo chamber turned the Zika virus and favelas into household words.Few outside Brazil cared about untreated sewage and teeming viruses in Rios picture-postcard Guanabara Bay before its polluted waters were chosen for Olympic swimming and sailing. Rios alarming murder rate and turf wars between drug lords and police werent so high on the globes agenda before athletes and hundreds of thousands of Olympic visitors discovered that the prospect of being in harms way has long been the darker flipside of Brazilian Samba, carnival and caipirinha cocktails.Despite the problems, Olympic ideals arent dead. Pope Francis told pilgrims on Wednesday at his weekly audience at the Vatican that in a world thirsty for peace, tolerance and reconciliation, he hopes the games can inspire everyone to pursue a prize that is not a medal but something more precious -- achieving a civilization in which solidarity reigns, founded on the recognition that we are all members of one human family.The U.S. womens basketball coach, Geno Auriemma, called the Olympics a two-week haven where people can get away from it all.Every time you get here, get settled in, nothing seems to matter to any country other than the competition -- as it should be, said Auriemma, now at his third games. These two weeks, the joy and spirit of competition seems to win out.And even on the streets of Rio, some Brazilians are beginning to embrace the moment and all that it means.Finally people are beginning to feel the Olympic spirit, said Ilene Pessoa, a college administrator who lives in Rios Copacabana neighborhood. The eyes of the world are on us.---Associated Press journalists Joshua Goodman, Doug Feinberg and Warren Levinson in Rio de Janeiro and Philippe Sotto in Paris contributed. ' ' '