Michigan State Defeats Nike Elite, 85-81
11/13/2003 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Nov. 13, 2003
EAST LANSING, Mich. - Nike Elite Coach Glenn Sergent "...They have a great shot of winning the conference, they should be very competitive...I think Tom (Izzo) has got a good club here, it looks like he plans on playing a lot of people."
"Michigan State played hard, when they get used to Tom's system and play as hard as they did tonight, they are going to win a lot of ball games...When the chips were down, Tom had his guys down on the floor."
Michigan State Coach Tom Izzo "Well, we have made some progress in some areas. It's kind of criminal (about) Kelvin Torbert. I think he was a guy that we really missed. He was playing so well. He was checking probably as well as anybody. He was rebounding well. He was scoring and losing him I think hurt us a little bit."
"Then you have to understand the substitution pattern. I went in with the game plan exactly how many minutes I wanted to play people. (Other than) The injury, we played the people we wanted to play. That's not always conducive for winning games but we just felt we had to do some things to try and get some people into the game. Once we start playing (regular season), we can't really afford any experiments because of our first six or seven games. We did our experimenting tonight."
"I think Chris Hill again played well. We moved Alan Anderson to two positions and he played well. Torbert played very well. And we got a little bit out of Jason Andreas and I thought he did a good job. He deserved the minutes that he played."