Illini Basketball 2025-2026
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Missouri, SEC top tier team and Kansas should be an annual thing.
Missouri in St. Louis, Strong SEC Team a home/away thing and Kansas a Kemper Arena/United Center thing.
Bingo. Drop, AND going over the screen takes away the 3 and protects the basket. The hole is in the middle which is why it’s an analytically sound coverage. Analytically, the 2 worst shots you can take in a pick and roll situation is the mid range pull-up and the floater.
Drop also keeps the game 2 on 2 between the handler and the screener and their defenders. The other 3 guys can stay with their man and take away high percentage, catch and shoot, kickout 3s.
I do think sometimes we go over on non shooters, and I’m not a big fan of that.
Overall, you need a top 40 defense and top 10 offense. The question is if we have personnel to get a top 40 defense, regardless of scheme, CONSISTENTLY.
I think he's going to do just fine. Let's do this!
Agree but think the first round of Kansas games should be on campus. Do the other places afterwards kinda like Tennessee
Everyone can recruit off campus now. Just not everyone at once
Dan
Admin
Crocker Joins Illini Staff as Assistant Coach - University of Illinois Athletics
Illinois head coach Brad Underwood announced Thursday the hiring of Camryn Crocker as assistant coach. A former Ivy League player at Penn, Crocker brings a decade
fightingillini.com
Yeah but...is he Athletic enough?
Agreed, I'd love to have an MSG game every couple of years as well, could be SEC, ACC, or any good team honestly..... Gonzaga, UAz, or similar.
Tevo
- Wilmette, IL
I’ve heard Crocker is like Steve Kerr, but a better tactician and player manager.
I mean did you not understand Bears fans hatred of Shane Waldron? Or Mel Tucker years ago?
Plenty of good head coaches hire bad assistants and retain them out of loyalty.
Doug Pederson ended up getting fired from head coaching jobs in both Philly and Jacksonville because of his loyalty to Press Taylor. Bill Belichick hired Matt Patricia as an offensive coordinator one year.
Obviously, my examples are football related because there are clear roles but if a guy is being touted as a defensive coordinator for struggling defenses thrn he will obviously catch flak for it.
sacraig
- The desert
Serious question: Where does the NCAA come up with their rules? It really just seems like they make things up just to say they have rules.
They didn’t change the number of recruits allowed on the road at once. They just made it so any of the 5 assistants can do it when they upped the number of on court assistants as school could have.
Agreed on pretty well all of your points here.
I don’t want to praise the defense too much because it’s till an area for improvement imo, but the scheme itself (and by extension the coaches implementing it) isn’t like this it is this sore thumb type of problem that JW/BU are just ignoring because they love Hamer so much and want to be able to take him on all their outings with the men’s golf team.
You can pick out some games where we pretty much failed defensively, but you also go through other successful teams’ schedules and find the same thing. We probably won’t see a perfect or near perfect season front-to-back again a la 2005. Too much parity in these power conferences for that now.
You can also go through our schedule and pick out some good defensive performances in games where you wouldn’t think you would be able to find those (ie, where the other team scored more than, say 80 points but the pace was extremely fast). For example if you felt like by watching the Purdue game that “well Purdue just wasn’t very good on offense” then the defense can also get some credit for that, it’s not like Braden is out here point shaving.
My only real bones to pick with the defense is we don’t seem to have a counter for what we do. Last year we would drop, and if that didn’t work…we would drop. I think that is truly a personnel thing because we don’t have the guys to do much else.
Personally I’m a firm believer that you have to be able to zone every now and then if a team gets some rhythm on you. But I understand the reluctance if our defense goals are to keep teams 3s low and be an elite rebounding team. Zone doesn’t correlate well with that.
I think many of us have expressed our frustration with Brad for putting Hamer into a position for which he's clearly shown to be out of his depth.
Even just mixing up the coverage on possessions (not necessarily zone) should help throw teams off. Otherwise, the offense is going to eventually find the gaps in the D
I don't know about it being way overstated. Stats don't always tell the story but the combo of eye-test and stats is not pretty.
94th in Overall Defensive Efficiency
238th in Opponents Points Per Game (some of this is pace per play but that's still atrocious)
131st Opponents Field Goal %
This was a pretty bad defensive team. Obviously a big part of that was personnel, but the scheme and lack of adjustments exacerbated the weaknesses. I understand the drop coverage theory, but I'm not sure it can be effective enough to be an elite team at this level.
Bigtex
- DFW
same with Humrichous.
I think this is a misread. I don't have any anger towards Hamer. I don't respect him because he's bad at coaching defense (and has personal traits that make him an easy target for keyboard warriors). The closest thing I have to anger is dismay at the hold he had over BU to continue to in his role and drive this past season's underperformance. To your point, that is a BU issue. I like the Crocker hire and am hopeful that he is given the chance to turn things around. But I was hopeful with Chester too and we see how that turned out.
I'd accuse you of cherry picking tempo-dependent metrics, but you do realize (and admit) we play at an extremely high pace.
I think it is overstated by many, which was my original statement. I didn't say, you know, "in general, that they're way overstated".
Definitely it is an area for improvement, and really the only sentence you typed that I would take issue with is 'This was a pretty bad defensive team' as being the 40th ranked D on Kenpom & 42nd ranked D on Torvik isn't 'a pretty bad defensive team', that is nearly top 10 percentile. And I do of course tend to lean toward these tempo-free stats as I feel that is important given how we play on offense.
What would you do in lieu of the drop coverage with the personnel we have?
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