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Michigan State Basketball Italy Trip: MSU vs Florence Recap

Follow along with some tweets to see how the MSU basketball team is doing in Italy. Unfortunately there's no way to watch it or listen but we're doing our best to track it. Final: MSU 98, Florence 54

By Moban
Mark Konezny-USA TODAY Sports

Starting with four players? I guess Izzo likes to challenge his players?

The #FreeMarvinClark bandwagon might be gaining some new members

McQuaid but tomato potato. Interesting who's playing PG in this lineup and the guess is currently McQuaid. Per Mike Wilson he's been taking reps at PG in practice.

PG McQuaid confirmed

Good to see Kenny Goins getting some run over there

Remember he was slated to be the starter ahead of Ellis and Forbes before he got injured

*Thumbs up emoji*

Matt Van Dyk is a walk-on originally from Imlay City and played at Hope College, St. Clair County Community college before transferring to MSU last year. Read more about him here

Cue free throws jokes

I'm guessing this has more to do with getting others involved than it does anything negative against Clark

#SWollenman

Due to the scoreline not being close, it appears as though MSU's first opponents on this trip was a step below them. Hopefully we'll have the box score come in so we can get into more detail about how their first game went.

A special thanks to Jim Gibson (@JimGibson7 on Twitter) for live tweeting the game. This will be updated as more info comes in.

Update:

Some Izzo quotes:

"All in all, I thought we shot it really well," said head coach Tom Izzo. "(Denzel) Valentine and (Bryn) Forbes were great. I thought (Gavin) Schilling played better the second half. We got something out of a lot of different guys. There were a lot of positives, but we have to keep in mind that was a club team, and now we will play three national teams. It’s going to be a lot, lot, lot, lot, lot different."

"They ran some good stuff early and gave us a few problems," Izzo said. "It’s hard to play 14 guys, and yet we tried to do that. I think we got a lot out of it. I think we played better the second half. We played four freshmen and new guys at one time. That wasn’t healthy, but I think they got some experience."

"I thought we were locked in," said Izzo. "The only thing we did wrong was when we made some turnovers. We made a lot of free throws tonight, which is encouraging. We shot the ball well from three. Defensively I thought we were pretty good. We took some chances. Some things we haven’t covered yet, that you forget to cover and all of a sudden there were a couple plays that they ran that created some problems for us. We made some adjustments at halftime. I was really pleased but I’m trying to keep it in perspective."

"We tried to go in with about four different lineups, that we wanted to make sure who played well together," Izzo explained. "We did that – some were positive, some were negative. You put Matt McQuaid in a tough position and play him at the point most of the game, and he’s never played there in his life. I thought he was adequate. Kyle (Ahrens) struggled a little bit at times. DD (Deyonta Davis) was pretty good at times. But all three of them, for freshmen, being in a foreign country for their first game, I was pretty pleased with it."


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