Illinois 78, Nicholls State 70 OT POSTGAME

#102      
Missed waaaaay too many bunnies, free throws and tried to force it into the paint.

Everyone gets an F except Feliz, ayo, and Kofi. Trent - terrible. Kipper - good and terrible. Orange Krush - épouvantable.

Trent, other than making baskets, was good and a big reason we won down the stretch. His defense was spectacular. Feliz is our best player; he took over at the end when no one else would/could. Ayo has a ways to go; the sloppy ball handling (i.e. turnovers) needs to stop.
 
#103      

skyIdub

Winged Warrior
Meh, not going to overreact too much. It was a terrible finish to a game we were in control of. Credit Nicholls St., they challenged and didn't back down. Our guys sat back and coasted. Top 10 teams have lost these games before and recovered.
 
#104      

Deleted member 746273

D
Guest
Wins a win. Bottom line is we avoided having this loss on our tourney resume down the road.
 
#105      
Yeah, the defense wasn’t great, but was good enough that they should have comfortably won.
This team should have put up +80 on these guys.
They missed layups, missed free throws, sloppy turnovers, and overall looked undisciplined at the half court.
Unfortunately they got a couple tough road games coming up, so they need to gel fast.
 
#107      
If BU doesn't understand by now that KN and DW are liabilities when on the court then he never will....AG has a nose for the ball and I'll take his scoring and rebounding with his mistakes over upperclassmen who are timid and not sticking their nose in to get the offensive rebounds that AG does...
If KN and DW keep getting minutes over AG and Tev(when he returns) then kiss the dance bye bye...It is what it is and wishing KN or DW will ever do any better than they have so far is a pipe dream...It's not like this was their first game ..we have seen this before and I doubt they will improve as much as AG with comparable minutes...JMHO
DaMonte is a glue guy, he knows what his role is and I thought he played well tonight and did the things this team needs from him.
 
#108      
Oh, boy. That game was gross. #294 Kenpom-Nichols St. comes into our house and gives us a game? Dear Coach, if u go .500 or worse this year as tonight's performance indicates, your seat will be hotter than blue blazes!
 
#109      
47-36 in the second half, really hard to watch. But I'm sitting in the "this means very little" camp. Hopefully we get all the good that comes from a terrible upset (what I would guess is a pretty rough week of practice and a bunch of players who realize this won't be easy) but don't have to actually have the loss. I hope.
 
#110      
For the third straight year our half court offense stinks!
I thought it last year and this game cements it, Feliz is the best all around player on this team.
Not sure how any NBA General Manager can think Ayo is a lottery pick.
Your watching children learning to play together not million dollar NBA all-stars sit back support your team and watch them grow this game shouldn’t be the most important thing in your lives IF IT IS WELL ENOUGH SAID
 
#111      

APS iMBA

Urbana, IL
While everyone is criticizing (perfectly understandable) there was one positive that may mean a lot over the coming season: Georgi Bezhanishvili hit on a pair of three-pointers.
Yeah that was a lot of fun to see. I know there have been naysayers on this and other boards about his 3-pt shooting. Hopefully he continues to make his shots.
 
#112      
Horrendous 2nd half defense. So many open looks. I saw this one good half team a lot last year. This team has a lot to prove! The effort given the 2nd half should not be an option for a team that won 12 games last year and has proven nothing on the court, yet And I am not of the opinion this is a deep team, especially if Jones is not playing.
Nichols, showed no energy and Williams still won't shoot (i pull each one them 100%). At one point around the middle of the second half Williams, had the ball right inside the middle of the free throw line with nobody within 5 feet of him. He took a couple dribbles toward the basket tried to dish and turned it over. For goodness sake he has to shoot that! What he take 1 shot maybe 2. Griffin, played with energy.
 
#113      
Ok, not seeing highlights til now, I thought we were doomed and damned. Lol. I don't know what anyone else is looking at, but I see a plethora of brilliant blooms springing forth in this team...and they already look like a TEAM that learned to walk last year, to an " I believe they are beginning to run". I've seen pathetic Illini teams where no hope was apparent...I think these guys are gonna be special. And this is just by how crappy we thought they were cuz they weren't beating the line by halftime. These guys usher in a new era. Forever Illinois.
 
#114      
I refuse to go totally insane beacause a lot of freshman and sophomores didn't mesh first game. I've played this game all my life not realizing there are so many layers that are involved in the making of a team. This team looks good.
I feel the same I believe in supporting these kids in the good and the bad sometimes you need to pick a kid up dust em off and ask them to work harder on their failures and don’t get me wrong they had failures tonight but their going to their KIDS
 
#115      
They gave up 0.89 points per possession. Maybe you want to do better against Nicholls State, but the offense was a good sight worse than the defense tonight.

Time and again it looked like Nichols State was much quicker than we were. But absolutely right, the offense, only on a handful occasions looked like it was playing together as a team.
 
#116      

Deleted member 29907

D
Guest
1. Not sure why BU doesn't know how to handle a D that basically is his D turned against us. Back door cuts would have been wide open. When a team is over aggressive, use it against them. A bit troubling not to recognize that...
2. GB needs to stop reading his press - hustle and hard work got him to success last year. Leave the cheerleaders and refs alone - get back to focusing on basketball.
3. Not sure why Feliz was running the offense so much last night. Clearly he bailed us out (so no cards and letters please), but he also did not really run the offense as much as it was him trying to get to the rim. There were multiple times he should have dumped to Kofi or another big when he did for wide open dunks. Again, he saved our bacon, but I saw very little pinch post, organized offense last night - rather scrambling for our lives. Ayo or Trent need to run the point.
4. We seem to be sleepwalking thru these last two games with the non-pressure D. While I think going away from denying the passing lanes outside is generally good, I am not sure why we didn't full court or 3/4 court press more when they started to make a run - we just sat back and took the 14-0 run beating.
 
#117      
Your watching children learning to play together not million dollar NBA all-stars sit back support your team and watch them grow this game shouldn’t be the most important thing in your lives IF IT IS WELL ENOUGH SAID
[/QUOTE

I dare you to call anyone on this team a child. LOL This is not an 8th grade basketball team. Not sure why saying that the half court offense stinks, Ayo is not a NBA lottery pick (sorry) and Feliz is the best player on this team has you in such a tizzy.
 
#118      
Strange game by us all around. Offensively we never got into a rhythm. Some of that is their defensive style, which is similar to our old one.

When a team maniacally denies like that, you don’t really run offense anymore. You just attack your 1 on 1 matchups and make plays. Seems like we had a couple guys ready for that and a couple not ready.

Our late game offense with the weakside overloaded horns sets were great. I missed about 10 minutes to start the second half, but I don’t recall seeing those at any other time.

I think what I’m getting at is we didn’t really appear to be running much offensively, and we haven’t meshed enough yet to understand how to play off each other when it’s in a read and react situation. That late pass from ayo to kofi that we turned over was a set we ran a lot with great success last year, particularly against msu.

Defensively, now that we’ve toned down the aggression schematically, I almost felt like it impacted our mentality. There’s an attitude piece to denying like crazy, even if you give up a layup. We didn’t appear to have that same intensity on defense, and I honestly felt like it slowed down our offense too. We have to figure out how to channel that aggression into the softer denial defense that we seem to be playing. For those of you yearning for it, this is the defense BU played after that 0-6 start at ok state, with maybe a little more zone.
 
#120      

Retro62

North Bethesda, Maryland
One concern I have is that Georgi is not getting his touches down low. I know Kofi is a monster and will pay off, but without those points from Georgi in the paint, I believe we are going to struggle. He was a go to force last year, and settled the team with his work down low on many occasions. Trent's shot will fall, he's not Kipper, BU needs to find a way to work our two bigs together, while working to get them both time in the low post. I think it will happen.
 
#121      
From what I've seen so far, this looks like a continuation of last season with a couple new faces. Hopefully they make the leap everyone expected, but I assumed that included blowing out Lewis and Nicholls St. Looking forward to seeing what we do Friday night.
 
#122      
1. Not sure why BU doesn't know how to handle a D that basically is his D turned against us. Back door cuts would have been wide open. When a team is over aggressive, use it against them. A bit troubling not to recognize that...
2. GB needs to stop reading his press - hustle and hard work got him to success last year. Leave the cheerleaders and refs alone - get back to focusing on basketball.
3. Not sure why Feliz was running the offense so much last night. Clearly he bailed us out (so no cards and letters please), but he also did not really run the offense as much as it was him trying to get to the rim. There were multiple times he should have dumped to Kofi or another big when he did for wide open dunks. Again, he saved our bacon, but I saw very little pinch post, organized offense last night - rather scrambling for our lives. Ayo or Trent need to run the point.
4. We seem to be sleepwalking thru these last two games with the non-pressure D. While I think going away from denying the passing lanes outside is generally good, I am not sure why we didn't full court or 3/4 court press more when they started to make a run - we just sat back and took the 14-0 run beating.

That's what their defense is designed to do. And they're pretty well equipped to do it with how much speed they have. Give them credit. BU needed to adjust and get another ball handler in the game. He didn't and that almost killed us. The good news is I don't think we'll see that defense again this year.
 
#123      

Steelyunk

Tobacco Road
Strange game by us all around. Offensively we never got into a rhythm. Some of that is their defensive style, which is similar to our old one.

When a team maniacally denies like that, you don’t really run offense anymore. You just attack your 1 on 1 matchups and make plays. Seems like we had a couple guys ready for that and a couple not ready.

Our late game offense with the weakside overloaded horns sets were great. I missed about 10 minutes to start the second half, but I don’t recall seeing those at any other time.

I think what I’m getting at is we didn’t really appear to be running much offensively, and we haven’t meshed enough yet to understand how to play off each other when it’s in a read and react situation. That late pass from ayo to kofi that we turned over was a set we ran a lot with great success last year, particularly against msu.

Defensively, now that we’ve toned down the aggression schematically, I almost felt like it impacted our mentality. There’s an attitude piece to denying like crazy, even if you give up a layup. We didn’t appear to have that same intensity on defense, and I honestly felt like it slowed down our offense too. We have to figure out how to channel that aggression into the softer denial defense that we seem to be playing. For those of you yearning for it, this is the defense BU played after that 0-6 start at ok state, with maybe a little more zone.
this is really insightful and captures what i was thinking about this game. good post. i think that frenetic defensive energy fed the offense last year. having said that i hated all the fouling last year. i do believe they'll find the right mix of pressure and poise and they will win closer to 20 games this year. i think they will be - despite this game - much more fun to watch. however, this game didn't do much to inspire that confidence.
 
#124      
I woke up in a sweat. Had a bad dream that our much hyped team fell apart late and had to go to overtime to beat a lower tiered, far inferior team. So what was the score from last night's game?