Spartans cruise to victory over Idaho
Though the outcome wasn’t surprising, Sunday evening’s 100-62 win allowed some Spartan fans to breath a sigh of relief. Already this season, we’ve seen a handful of close calls for major conference teams including Duke and Wisconsin.
Chris Allen and Raymar Morgan led the way with 21 points each. Allen and Morgan, along with Lucas, Walton, and Suton, started the game and played a combined 107 minutes, or roughly 54% of total time. Just like we saw in MSU’s exhibition games, Izzo had an opportunity to go deep into his bench and give a few minutes to the team’s walk-ons.
Following his team’s loss, Vandals’ coach Don Verlin had nothing but praise for the Spartans.
“I’d like to thank Michigan State for inviting us and kicking our tails tonight, they dominated us in every phase of the game,” said Idaho coach Don Verlin, who later called MSU a “top-five and maybe better than that basketball team in the country.”
The only concern coming out of this game is Michigan State’s rebounding, or lack thereof. Idaho outrebounded MSU 33-31, with 14 offensive boards. While not a factor on Sunday, this number will be much harder to swallow against North Carolina on December 3rd.
Tom Izzo addressed the rebounding issue in the post-game press conference.
To get out-rebounded by that team was disappointing. Yet, there were some real bright spots in maybe the passing, and yet we were not real sharp when we had three bigs in there with (Delvon) Roe, Morgan and (Goran) Suton, I think because we didn’t practice that very much because Roe can’t really practice a lot in that situation. Some of our problems are still going to remain problems for a while.
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