Pregame: Illinois vs Baylor, Wednesday, December 2nd, 9:00pm CT, ESPN

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#126      

BigMuddyMonster

BigMuddyMonster
BigMuddyMonster
All I can say is Baylor better hope that the game isn’t very close or tied with a minute left. Time and time again Ayo has shown that he is a stone cold closer. He has a will to win and clutch gene that only a handful of players have shown to have.
 
#128      

goillini30

goillini30
goillini30
Hoops3 said:
What is no middle man to man?
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It's the style of man to man that Texas Tech popularized recently. It's designed to prevent the offense from getting the ball in the paint. It uses the old Thibs "ice" defense against wing ball screens where you try to force the ball handler away from the ball screen. You also try to force drives to the baseline where you can cut them off. It's almost the opposite of the pack line defense. Here's a good video about Baylor's version:

Also, that youtube channel and Twitter account are a good follow if you have any interest in x's and o's. The same guy has a podcast called Solving Basketball and had an episode in March with Gentry that was really interesting.
 
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#129      

Dan

Dan
Admin
Dan
Fun fact- Illinois on a 7 game losing streak on ESPN in the regular season. Last win on ESPN in regular season: 2015 Michigan game. Go Illini
 
#130      

BlueLeader

BlueLeader
BlueLeader
Dan said:
Fun fact- Illinois on a 7 game losing streak on ESPN in the regular season. Last win on ESPN in regular season: 2015 Michigan game. Go Illini
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tenor.gif
 
#133      

altenberger22

altenberger22
South Carolina
altenberger22
goillini30 said:
It's the style of man to man that Texas Tech popularized recently. It's designed to prevent the offense from getting the ball in the paint. It uses the old Thibs "ice" defense against wing ball screens where you try to force the ball handler away from the ball screen. You also try to force drives to the baseline where you can cut them off. It's almost the opposite of the pack line defense. Here's a good video about Baylor's version:

Also, that youtube channel and Twitter account are a good follow if you have any interest in x's and o's. The same guy has a podcast called Solving Basketball and had an episode in March with Gentry that was really interesting.
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Great video! Very solid stuff!

That's exactly the defense employed at my HS in Illinois.....and was taught in Middle School from 5th grade on.
* Switch out front.
* Force to the baseline.
* Help.
* And then run to the open man and cover.

Back then, we just referred to it as man-to-man. Baylor looked great in those highlights. I think Scott Drew definitely learned something from his old man.
 
#134      

evanruss9

E
evanruss9
seriously impressed...see still 4th in the nat champ odds!

vegas has illini 4th but baylor 6th, yet rankings heavily favor baylor.
 
#135      

Fighter of the Nightman

Fighter of the Nightman
Chicago, IL
Fighter of the Nightman
Ubermensch said:
Boy, I really don't remember UI reaching #2 in 2001/02.
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Yeah, I had seen that before but was very surprised the first time I came across it. Most of us probably remember it as the slight "fall off year" from the Elite Eight season in 2001, but in 2001 we actually only ever made it up to #3 and spent a lot of the year in the 6-10 range. We were actually only one game better recordwise in 2001, but our wins were just so good (good enough to earn a No. 1 seed).

I think this game is actually bigger for the program than the Wake Forest game was in 2005. We were coming off of a Sweet Sixteen season, and we had won the Big Ten three out of four years; Illinois basketball was quite established. With last year being ripped away from us, a lot of casual fans might still see a stat like "Illinois' first NCAA Tournament appearance since 2013" and form their impression of our program that way. Beating #2 on a neutral site catapults us back into the Big Boys Club for the rest of the year, even if we slip up here and there.

Not to mention, Baylor isn't just any old #2 ... I think in the eyes of the college basketball world, Gonzaga is effectively the 2005 Illini squad, and Baylor is the 2005 North Carolina squad. In other words, most fans think the dropoff after the top 2 is huge. If we could beat Baylor, we shake up that perception and get a new generation of people thinking of the Illini as we all did from 2000-2006.

P.S. Obligatory reminder to everyone that rankings ALWAYS matter, no matter what time of year it is, for program perception and hype, and I LOVE being in the top five! :)

P.P.S. I'm also not convinced whatsoever that the Tournament Committee doesn't consider AP top 25 rankings, even with the new NET Rankings or whatever. They have other things to consider, like avoiding conference matchups in the first two rounds and geography, and there is no way they don't let the top 25 come into their minds a bit.
 
#136      

lstewart53x3

lstewart53x3
Scottsdale, Arizona
lstewart53x3
While I think we are a very good team, who I see ending the year ranked in the 10-15 range, I don’t think we’re an elite team, yet.

But Baylor is.

I’ve got Baylor by 10.
 
#137      

Tenacious D

T
Tenacious D
I am so excited about this game. I grew up in Bloomington, IL. and a lifelong Illini fan going back to the 80s (so I have been a fan through many of years and great times). I also attended Baylor for my undergrad and naturally a fan of my alma mater as well.
I have to be honest in that my interest and attention in following the Illini had started to drift away after Bruce left and I gave John a chance but it never seemed to improve...and then at the same time Drew had things going in the right direction for a while now ...so I have been following them more closely.

It is not easy to pick who I want to win or support in these situations as the football teams have played each other too. Really happy to see what Brad has done at UI as I was familiar with him when he was at OSU.

This particular Baylor team reminds me so much of the 2005 Illini team because of their guard play, and having two others down in the post as serviceable & support players. One player that I would tell you to keep an eye out for is Adam Flagler, who comes off the bench, and he may be the best pure shooter of the whole team in a guard role.

Anyway, looking forward to watching the game as I think it will be very exciting and entertaining. It is great experience for both teams no matter who wins or loses.
 
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#139      

Ubermensch

Ubermensch
BOOM! Feed my ego.
Ubermensch
I'd like to see what Baylor BB fans think about the upcoming game, but I can't find any active forums. Anyone have a link?
 
#140      

Dan

Dan
Admin
Dan
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1333843679249838088

Underwood on Baylor: Great challenge. They're No. 2 in the country for a reason. It'll be a great test for us and one we're excited for. We're going to have to play very well and very hard to win.

Underwood: It's a great opportunity. It's a great challenge, a great team. There's a lot of room to grow yet with this group. You want to find out where you're at. You want to see what you get exposed by or what you can do against quality opponents.

Underwood: We want to play good people and quality people. This was the opportunity to play a great opponent in a great opponent after losing Florida MTE and Arizona.

Underwood: "Ayo's confidence resonates through our locker room."

Underwood said he's still trying to settle on his rotation off the bench but that he's "got a good idea."

Underwood said team, especially Ayo and Frazier, are locked in. Said "there wasn't any nonsense" at practice yesterday. "Hard to explain unless you see it."

#illini will get into Indy at 10 p.m. today. "That way, it's watch film and go to bed."

Guys can't leave rooms. They have wipes to wipe down the room. Wear masks everywhere they go. Travel with nurses who provide antigen tests.

Underwood said he's trying to find ways to travel day of during conference play so they can avoid hotels.

Underwood: "This is where we belong. That I'm proud of." Illinois should be in these types of games.

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#141      

Mitch Hennessey

Mitch Hennessey
Mitch Hennessey
Ubermensch said:
I'd like to see what Baylor BB fans think about the upcoming game, but I can't find any active forums. Anyone have a link?
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SB Nation: Our Daily Bears
247/Scout Site: Bears Illustrated
Main site: SicEm365

A word of caution: Baylor's fanbase cares far more about football than basketball (it is Texas, after all), so most of the chatter on those boards revolves around football right now. Additionally, on what I posted as the "main board," SicEm365, most of the basketball talk occurs on the paid side. Don't expect too much chatter on any of the free sites until after football season, unfortunately.
 
#142      

Deleted member 747277

D
Guest
Deleted member 747277
I’m really hoping to avoid a 2019 Arizona game—last year’s first big test. I can take a loss, but watching the team get run out of the gym was as tough a loss as I can remember in recent years in light of last year’s expectations.
 
#145      

ILLjuice

ILLjuice
ILLjuice
3xIllini said:
I’m really hoping to avoid a 2019 Arizona game—last year’s first big test. I can take a loss, but watching the team get run out of the gym was as tough a loss as I can remember in recent years in light of last year’s expectations.
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I feel like we're much more refined now. We understand our own rotations much better. How to use KC and GB together effectively. If that game were at the end of last season I believe we would've seen a much different game.
 
#146      

Fighter of the Nightman

Fighter of the Nightman
Chicago, IL
Fighter of the Nightman
3xIllini said:
I’m really hoping to avoid a 2019 Arizona game—last year’s first big test. I can take a loss, but watching the team get run out of the gym was as tough a loss as I can remember in recent years in light of last year’s expectations.
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I agree with this, and I am optimistic that we will not get blown out in that way. If you'll remember, we looked great at Arizona last year for quite a while, and we simply ran out of gas, causing it to get ugly. This team has lived a few college basketball lifetimes since then, and our mental toughness, experience and skills are just so much better. We also don't have to go into a snake pit, and I honestly think that the close call vs. Ohio was exactly what this squad needed before this big test.

Heart: Illinois 78, Baylor 77

Head: Baylor 81, Illinois 72

As long as it's close and we look good, we come out of this game still ready for a special season!
 
#147      

Chukwuwumba

Chukwuwumba
Chukwuwumba
Mitch Hennessey said:
Ok, here goes nothin'. Admittedly, I haven't watched a ton of Illini/B1G ball in the past 12 months, so I hope I can do your squad justice. The little I do know is that Kofi Cockburn is a beast, and that your guards can fill it up in a hurry, especially Ayo Dosunmu.

Baylor Strengths: Defense, offensive rebounding, and extremely unselfish play offensively.

Baylor is really good defensively. Davion Mitchell might be the best one-on-one defensive guard in the country, and Mark Vital is a contender for DPOY. Outside of those two, the rest of the squad knows their roles and are great on rotations in the half-court. Baylor has been one of the consistently best offensive rebounding teams in the country for years, and crashing the offensive glass is something that is in the team's DNA at this point. With the guards on this team, it'd be easy for egos to get involved, but the team is unselfish, almost to a fault. The top 4 guards will all defer to one another if one guy has the hot hand, and with 4 of them, it's very unlikely that more than 2 have an off night at a time.

Baylor Weaknesses: The 5 spot, turnovers, FT shooting, and scoring droughts.

Tristan Clark was projected to man the middle, and was among the most efficient players in the country in 2018-19. Unfortunately, he suffered a pretty significant knee injury early in conference play that season and was never able to fully work his way back. He medically retired from basketball a few weeks ago, and while many in the Baylor fanbase took this as a sign that he had been beaten out and we would be fine at 5, I'm not so convinced. Flo Thamba struggles against athletic big men, and JTT is still getting up to speed after not playing for two years.

Baylor is also prone to turning the ball over, and will let teams hang around that have no business being in the game through sloppy play. FT shooting has also been an issue, and although the guards are nails from a FT% standpoint, we can have inexplicable streaks of misses as a team. Vital and Thamba are very poor FT shooters. Baylor also played in a lot of close games that shouldn't have been close last season, due to the fact that they would get up 12-15 points and then just...stop scoring. For long stretches at a time. Interim Coach Jerome Tang mentioned in the Washington postgame that this has been a point of emphasis this year, but it cost us in a few games last year (Washington, West Virginia, TCU, Kansas).

Baylor Starting 5:

G: Davion Mitchell (6'2", 205 lbs, JR) - A former Auburn transfer, Mitchell is lightning quick, supremely athletic, and typically is assigned the role of guarding the other team's best perimeter player. He can get to the rim at will, but had some trouble finishing, and while he shot a respectable 32% from 3 last year, he's not a volume shooter and can be very streaky.

G: Jared Butler (6'3", 195 lbs, JR) - Butler is Baylor's best NBA prospect and is the star of the team, if you had to name one guy. He has fantastic handles and can light it up from well beyond college 3-point range (38% 3PT shooter last season).

G: MaCio Teague (6'4", 195 lbs, SR) - A former UNC-Greensboro transfer, Teague probably has the most swagger on the team. A 36% 3PT shooter, he can just as easily score 20+ or be held to under 10, and if there's a game we lost last year that we shouldn't have, it was usually because he didn't have a great game. In fairness to MaCio, he did have a midseason wrist injury that required offseason surgery. He's a serviceable defender, but of the starting 5, he's probably the weakest on the defensive end.

F: Mark Vital (6'5", 250 lbs, SR) - Nicknamed "Mr. 95," because he does the 95% of things that don't show up in the box score, Vital is Baylor's version of Draymond Green. He sets the tone, provides energy, rebounds like a madman, runs the floor, and is a fantastic defender. When he exited the Washington game the other night with Baylor up big and under 4 minutes to go, he had more rebounds (15) than the entire Washington team did (14). He was called "the best player in the country who will never have a play run for him" the other night by Seth Greenburg, and it is probably not an exaggeration. He's less of an offensive threat than Draymond was at Michigan State, and is not nearly as trollish. He's not a threat to shoot, and his points will be on rim runs, lobs, in transition, or on offensive putbacks.

F: Flo Thamba (6'10", 245 lbs, JR) - Flo Thamba (rhymes with Mo Bamba) is sort of a hybrid 4/5. He typically matches up against bigs when he plays, and is sound defensively, but struggles with more athletic big men. Oscar Tshiebwe of West Virginia ate his lunch in Morgantown in our regular season finale. He's not much of a threat to score, relying mostly on putbacks and dump-offs in the lane from penetrating guards. His role last year was to provide minutes when we had foul trouble, and he filled it well. The jury is still out if he's up to the task of an expanded role against top flight competition.

Bench (in order of usage):

G: Adam Flagler (6'3", 180 lbs, SO) - Flagler is instant offense. He is filling the role of Devonte Bandoo this year, and is almost identical to Bandoo in size. For reference, Bandoo averaged 7.6 PPG on 38% shooting from 3. Flagler is a better shooter, however. He averaged almost 16 points a game as a true freshman at Presbyterian, hit over 100 3s, and was the Big South Freshman of the Year before transferring to a bigger stage.

F: Jonathan Tchamwa Tchatchoua (6'8", 245 lbs, SO) - JTT is a UNLV transfer, and is probably a guy who will be starting by midseason over Thamba, if I had to bet on it. He's an athletic big who can run the floor, although his conditioning is not where it needs to be after not playing for a few years. His scoring will likely be similar to Vital's - putbacks, transition, and dump-offs.

F: Matthew Mayer (6'9, 225 lbs, JR) - Mayer has evolved from the ultimate irrational confidence guy as a freshman to a guy who can harken back to another Baylor great on occasion: Vinnie "The Microwave" Johnson. Mayer had 5 double-digit scoring games last season, and in all of them he played 20 minutes or fewer. The hope this year is that he's taken the next step into being a guy you can rely on every night. Last season, he either put up a line like this one in the West Virginia game in Waco: 17 minutes played, 13 points, 8 rebounds, or he'll come in, jack up a couple of wild shots, commit a couple of silly fouls, and you won't hear from him the rest of the night. You'll know in the first few minutes he's in the game what kind of night it's going to be. I will say, when he's on, Baylor is near unbeatable.

G: LJ Cryer (6'1", 185 lbs, FR) - The PG of the future, he's a 4* recruit out of Houston. I didn't think he'd get a ton of run this early on, but he went 5-7 from 3 in the game against Louisiana on Saturday and finished with 17 points. His minutes will likely be determined by matchup and foul trouble.

You may see F Zach Loveday (7'0", 215 lbs, FR) and G/F Jordan Turner (6'8", 195 lbs, RsFR) with some spot minutes, but those guys are probably a year or two away from contributing and likely won't be in the rotation by midseason.

As to how I see the game going, I think there are a couple of factors at play. We don't have the bodies to defend Cockburn down low. Watching Cockburn reminds me of a slightly shorter, more offensively skilled, slightly less athletic Udoka Azubuike from Kansas the last few years. We've had very mixed results against players like that. In the game in Lawrence last year, we doubled before the entry pass was even made and it threw KU off their game. I wouldn't be surprised if we tried some of that on Wednesday and let the chips fall where they may, trying to make other players beat us. Conversely, Kansas had a plan to counter that scheme in the return to Waco and Azubuike absolutely annihilated us. It was still a close game down the stretch, but I think Illinois' best shot is to emulate the KU gameplan from last year and get Cockburn involved in the pick-n-roll early in possessions, and outside the paint. From there, he can either kick out from the inevitable double team, or he and Dosunmu can go matchup hunting.

One underrated aspect is officiating. If the game is called loosely, I think it favors Baylor. We're going to get up in your grill and likely double-team Cockburn at every opportunity. If the refs let them play, I could pretty easily see a scenario in which the Illini get frustrated and the game could get out of hand fairly quickly.

If it's called tightly, it could go either way. Our bigs are prone to foul trouble, especially Thamba and Vital, and a tight whistle could have those guys on the bench for long stretches, which obviously favors the Illini. The other side of that coin is it could land Cockburn in foul trouble, with the amount that he contests shots in the paint. If that happens, it becomes guards versus guards, and I think that matchup favors Baylor. I'm a little surprised the line is as close as it is, and I assume Vegas knows something I don't. My prediction is a game in the mid-70s for the winning squad, and I'm gonna go with the homer pick and say Baylor wins it 74-67.

Happy to answer any questions that you guys might have.
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Flo Thamba!!! Ghost of Illini Recruiting Misses strikes again.
 
#150      

altenberger22

altenberger22
South Carolina
altenberger22
lstewart53x3 said:
While I think we are a very good team, who I see ending the year ranked in the 10-15 range, I don’t think we’re an elite team, yet.

But Baylor is.

I’ve got Baylor by 10.
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Mr. Stewart, please put your glasses back on and take another stab at your homework submission /prognostication.

(Come to think of it, however, you're probably right. We could be simply riding the Andy Katz tidal wave of pre-season hype.)
 
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