NCAA Basketball: 25 best recruiting classes since 2000

23) 2007 Michigan State Spartans

This class rarely gets brought up when discussing the greatest recruiting classes in college basketball, yet there aren’t many that can top this group’s accomplishments.

Tom Izzo did not land a five-star prospect in this class, but a pair of top-40 prospects in Kalin Lucas and Durrell Summers did make it a top-10 class. And those two players, in particular, would go on to play enormous roles for Sparty during the next four years.

Lucas was a two-time All-Big Ten selection and won Conference Player of the Year in 2009, serving as the leader of the program during his final three years. Summers and Chris Allen, another key member of the class, were great defensively and as secondary offensive options.

Furthermore, both Lucas and Summers were four-years starters and carried Michigan State to outstanding success. The Spartans won the Big Ten title and made the Final Four in both 2009 and 2010, making the title game in 2009 before falling to North Carolina (thanks to another class we’ll touch on later in the list).

The only reason the 2007 Spartans don’t find themselves higher on this list is that members from other classes (the 2008 class featured Draymond Green) also played significant roles on those Final Four teams and they didn’t win a national title – but that shouldn’t take away from everything this group did.