Illini Basketball 2026-2027

#316      
It was concerning (once again) that Brad had to bring up Tomi's conditioning. Do they not have gyms over there in Croatia while waiting for his Visa? If we have a remotely strong Tomi and Z this year other teams are going to be in a world of hurt. If they are what they were last year...
 
#317      
It was concerning (once again) that Brad had to bring up Tomi's conditioning. Do they not have gyms over there in Croatia while waiting for his Visa? If we have a remotely strong Tomi and Z this year other teams are going to be in a world of hurt. If they are what they were last year...
How is Z's injured hand? Can't afford for his shooting to deteriorate from last year's suboptimal 28% from the arc.
 
#322      
Kind of a slow day, and I just wanted to say that I really hope the atmosphere at SFC is just simply flat-out better than last year on a consistent basis this year. All throughout this great renaissance of our program since 2019-2020, the SFC has just simply not gotten back to the mid-2000s level, EVEN for many big games. It has shown flashes of an absolute frenzied atmosphere for some really big, especially hyped and relatively rare games ... but our baseline for, say, a Tuesday night home game vs. Minnesota, always falls back to a frankly unacceptable level.

I am hopeful that this year could be different. The Krush seemed to respond to online criticism last year, and it got a lot better toward the end of the year, IMO. Additionally, whatever "reservations" our fans could have POSSIBLY had are now gone. We made it back to the NCAAs, we won multiple Big Ten banners, we've had elite NBA-level players come through, we have made it out of the Second Weekend AND we then we didn't just finally make it back to the Final Four ... we followed that accomplishment up with returning so much talent that we have a reasonable goal of doing it in back-to-back years for the first time in most fans' living memories.

There should be no excuse not to sell out every single home game that isn't vs. a total cupcake, and I would hope even those would easily break 15k.
 
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