Quotes From The Lockerroom
11/22/2002 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Michigan State coach Tom Izzo:
"Well, there were plenty of goods and plenty of bads tonight for an opener. First of all, you have to give credit to Eddie's (Biedenbach) team. We had a chance to knock them out a couple a couple of times and not getting it done is more a credit to them. Yet we had our moments when I thought we ran our break, played defense as we have, as far as our help defense. I think that the addition of Bograkos in there helped us some in that respect. I thought we did a nice job of moving the ball and getting the ball inside in the first half. But we had some negatives too. We had too many unforced turnovers. We had some breakdowns. Some of that was due to the fact that there are different players who haven't played with each other because of the way injuries and practices have gone."
"I think Kelvin Torbert was kind of the hero, from the standpoint of being able to play that many minutes. After being out for three weeks, I thought it was incredible on his part. He did some very good things also, especially defensively."
"I really wasn't satisfied with the play as far as not having a killer instinct to get things done and not taking care of the ball at key times. We got very lazy. Our freshmen, at times, were too casual. We seemed to play in spurts, and that's not good for our basketball team."
"On the positive side, I can't tell you how few practices we had with everybody together. I think that is really needed right now. We are going to get a couple good practices in before we go up there (Alaska Shootout). We've got to get better play out of our points. We got to get a better defense. We did such a great job on our help defenses in the first half. Then we got lazy and they started hitting some three's in the second half and hitting what I consider wide open shots."
UNCA head coach Eddie Biedenbach:
"We're disappointed in the game because we came up here to win the basketball game. Michigan State is a really good team. I was happy that they got a couple of their guys back that were injured. We weren't looking to come up here and play a weaker team in any way. Listening to Tom, they have had a tough time getting those guys together but with or without those guys they are a very strong basketball team, not only physically, but in how they play defense and what they do. We've learned a lot coming up here. This is our third time and we go back and look and film and see what Michigan State does defensively, they don't let you get to the basket. You can shoot some jump shots on them from time to time but you can't get rebounds when you play from the perimeter."