Pregame: Illinois vs Penn, Thursday, March 19th, 8:25pm CT, TNT

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#727      
RowdyFromRow22
Peek A Boo GIF by chuber channel

Game day! Let’s get the party started and make a run.
 
#730      
Fighter of the Nightman
thefalcon5 said:
This team has the highest floor since our 1 seed Ayo/Kofi year. That means a lot come March especially in the first couple rounds.

That doesn’t mean we win this game every time but it does make it much harder to be upset.
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I agree on paper, but that 2024 TSJ team wasn’t losing before the Sweet Sixteen. Even when we started out slow in our first game, I just felt like that squad played like men on a unified mission.
 
#733      
IlliniCub 16
ChiefGritty said:
We were horrendous in that game, Chattanooga choked so hard to not beat us.
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Kofi was good, Coleman was ok, and Plummer was awesome in the second half; everyone else was terrible.

I realize Trent had pink eye, but he and Damonte were a combined 1-9 from the field. Which is why the "Trent and Damonte would never let us lose like this" argument we saw on the board recently is silly. Coleman, Plummer, and Kofi were the ones who saved us from embarrassment.
 
#734      
gary?
ChiefGritty said:
We were horrendous in that game, Chattanooga choked so hard to not beat us.
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i seem to remember we got at least a couple (very) friendly calls in the closing minutes. honestly felt bad for chattanooga as they wanted it more than us.
 
#736      
Se Il Illini
rdk573 said:
The WSJ Sports writer begs to differ

WSJ Picks Penn over Ill

No. 14 Penn over No. 3 Illinois

Ezekowitz: 12%
KenPom: 3%

Ezekowitz cautions that this is improbable. But it might be less unlikely than you might think.

The Quakers squeaked into the NCAA tournament with back-to-back overtime wins in the Ivy League tournament. And even though they face an uphill climb against a Big Ten program, there’s a lot to like. They take care of the basketball and make 39% of their threes, led by former Duke recruit TJ Power, who notched 44 points against Yale in the Ivy championship.

That could be particularly dangerous against Illinois. The team’s defense essentially dares opponents to take threes with a defensive style that packs the paint and forces the lowest turnover rate of the 365 teams in Division I. Which is why it wouldn’t be totally crazy for Penn to win its first NCAA tournament game since 1994.
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The writer totally discounts the fact that Fran McCaffery teams do not play a lot of defense, and this should right into Illinois' gameplan. Penn may score a bunch, but Illinois will score more,
 
#741      
NarrowJ
RowdyFromRow22 said:
Hope we are ready to rebound with these lovely Wilson balls…
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They're overinflated again, from everything I've seen on social media... going to be lots of missed shots and turnovers

No clue why they want to do that
 
#742      
AirTran
PleaseMakeABowlGame said:
Your formulas are completely correct. But you calculated it wrong.

Two 5-12: 44.8%

Two 4-13: 19.01%
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Baaaaad numbers

Since the improved metrics were adopted by the committee (2016) there have only been 3 wins for the 14 seed.

That's a .075 winning pct.

Using data prior to 2016 has no quantitative relevance as the selection and seeding criteria were materially different.

Why did the committee make all of these changes? A: So there were fewer 14 v 3 upsets.
 
#748      
wc_illini
21ChampaignSt said:
Happy first round Thursday, yall! Best 4 days in sports and it's just soo much better when we're involved.

Since the question was asked in the press conference, I wanted to go back and see if I could find any commonalities between our 4 games that resulted in OT losses after giving up decent leads.

Specifically, is there anything we were doing worse / differently during the periods where we lost the leads?

I thought perhaps we became too reliant on threes in those stretches.
Nope. We actually shot threes at a lower per 40 rate than our season average.

What about fouls and turnovers?
Nope. Even though fouls were an issue vs Wisconsin in the BTT and turnovers were a major issue in the Wisconsin loss at home, that's not a common denominator.

The main issue that popped up in all 4 games during those stretches is 3p shooting and offensive rebounding.

We shot 25% from three and rebounded our own misses at an 8.4 per 40 rate - about 5 rebounds lower than our average.

Crazy theory:
We get these big leads with stretches of great shooting. Which means, there are fewer offensive rebounds up for grabs. Players start to anticipate the make rather than anticipate the miss. They stop crashing the offensive glass as hard because they haven't really had to the whole game. When we do finally start missing shots, we're now a step slow going for the boards.

Crazier theory:
We need to shoot more threes during these stretches! Maybe we aren't getting as many offensive rebounds because we're not shooting as many threes which produce those offensive rebounding opportunities.

Of course, that's just one half of the game. I didn't look at the defensive side beyond team fouls.

But here's to hoping we bring intensity every single play for the rest of the month. If we do, there's not a game in our bracket we can't win.
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I noticed in our last few games that our ORB% on the Ivisics' missed 3s is quite a bit lower than everyone else's misses (plus those two have missed a high %).

I wonder if that plays into the blown leads- were the two of them taking more 3s during those blown leads (which could explain both the 3pt% and ORB%), or were other guys missing and we weren't getting those ORB% at the rate we usually get?
 
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