Pregame: Illinois vs Long Island, Saturday, November 22nd, 1:00pm CT, B1G+

[From the cheap seats]

Regarding Andrej's FT shooting, he made 135 of 165 last season at Cal. That's 81.8%. Small sample size for him and others this season. Little early to brand him or the team as having FT problems. They did against Alabama and it cost them in terms of simple math. But 76% over 5 games (still small sample size) is pretty good. Even against Alabama, missed shots at the rim cost them more points than missed FTs.
Edit: Looks like I was a little too slow to post this

 

[madillini4]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1992239211781533857

 

[NarrowJ]

The crazy thing with Andrej is he was 135/165 or 82% from the line for the season last year at Cal while starting 28/29 games (33.5 minutes/game). The prior season at Stanford he shot 53% from the line averaging ~22 minutes/game. We need last year's Andrej to show up for the rest of this season.

Edit: NarrowJ beat me to it...

Regarding Andrej's FT shooting, he made 135 of 165 last season at Cal. That's 81.8%. Small sample size for him and others this season. Little early to brand him or the team as having FT problems. They did against Alabama and it cost them in terms of simple math. But 76% over 5 games (still small sample size) is pretty good. Even against Alabama, missed shots at the rim cost them more points than missed FTs.
Edit: Looks like I was a little too slow to post this

Right, and I think this is important. Out of the top 15 teams in the nation, we are 3rd out of those 15 teams in free throw percentage. And this is while having an 82% free throw shooter experiencing some early-season variance.

 

[skyIdub]

lol I think the narrative shouldn’t be “Illinois needs to improve their FT shooting”…it should be “Illinois needs to improve their FT shooting in big games”

The difference in these top matchups is minuscule. A couple fouls, a couple FTs, a few rebounds. If we executed….6 or 7 more plays better and shoot avg FTs, we win that game by 10+.

 

[NarrowJ]

lol I think the narrative shouldn’t be “Illinois needs to improve their FT shooting”…it should be “Illinois needs to improve their FT shooting in big games”

We shot 70% in the TT game and hit big ones down the stretch to close out the game

The narrative should be that there isn't a narrative, imo, its just statistical variance

The difference in these top matchups is minuscule. A couple fouls, a couple FTs, a few rebounds. If we executed….6 or 7 more plays better and shoot avg FTs, we win that game by 10+.

EDIT: Yes, totally agree: above free throws, I think defense, rebounding (and offense, to an extent) can be improved and move the needle further... we know we're a good FT shooting team

 

[21ChampaignSt]

Free throws are really the least of my worries. We've been kind of off since the Texas Tech game. Hoping that can just be written off to not being healthy. But if you remove our first two buy games, Torvik has us ranked 40th with a pretty mediocre offense and defense. Lots to work on today.

 

[BretMyBeachHouse]

Statistics without context don’t mean a lot.

And statistics with small sample sizes don't mean a lot either.

 

[pruman91]

all I know is when I played during the reign of the dinosaurs on Earth I still remember feeling different when I shot FT's in a cupcake game compared to a tight well attended game.....if it was easy then everyone would be above 90 %......but nervousness , different rim tension's , road games with loud crazy fans , etcetc , brings in anxiety that causes misses by players who you least expect to miss
FT's in most games played.......very few players have or had 90 + %'s in FT's.........it's just a roll of the dice shooting them compared to shooting FG's in the course of action being guarded......FT's are FREE from being guarded with everyone watching you shoot whether it's 100 people or 1,000 or 18,000 screaming at the top of their fanatical leather lungs.........JMHO.......

 

[bvn]

No, I get it. Of the 3, I think I’d agree. But you liked the post on the Petro minutes mostly opening from Mirk - so the group of 3, isn’t really what I think we’re looking at (I know it wasn’t your original post - you just responded)

Only 2 high major games with Keaton thus far, in order for us to be our best, we need him to grow, and it’s impossible he won’t have bumps. Although I honestly thought he was totally fine against tech.

How does the quality of the opponent affect free throw shooting? It's far more likely that the "context" is nothing more than random variance.

A quality opponent tires players more that can affect free throw