Illini Basketball 2026-2027

illinibbcz said:

Not after Lanter was hurt.

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Well, this is a good example of how a.season can turn without proper roster cinstruction and depth. Trying to say that no one will get hurt and iif it does we will be ok. I dont think next years team is in that type of situation but i pray Mirk stays healthy at the 4. He is the only banger we have

PleaseMakeABowlGame said:

Very mysterious stat for me is that Tomislav's 2pt attempts per game dropped from 5.1 in 2025 to 3.3 in 2026.

This is all while he shot 73% from two, which is a phenomenal percentage.

I understand roles chance; however, that steep of a dropoff while his percentage increased that drastically makes the logic quite strange, IMO

It needs to be AT LEAST 4.0 next year.

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You said it. Role changed. As a team, we were more perimeter oriented. Played through the post even less than last year (which already wasn't much). And when we did play inside out, we played through the 4 more than we did last year. That's why Tomi's assist numbers were down, too.

But I do think that in the very rare instances when we were going through a prolonged drought, a designed Tomi post up could've been implemented more often.

What I find slightly more mystifying though is his rebound numbers. Down 2 rebounds per game vs last year. I suppose this too, could be attributed to Mirk's emergence.

@thefalcon5 's post in the Coaching Carousel thread alluded to this, but Dusty May's departure leaves the door wide open for us to be the runaway favorite for the B1G regular season title. As it currently stands, Michigan was set to be our toughest test on the road this year, and with Dusty out, we should be going into the season favored in every single one of our away games.

If you look at the pre-season Torvik rankings, 5 of the top 6 teams we play in the B1G this year are home only (see next season's schedule vs. pre-season rank below). Even though we had Michigan at home last year, our away schedule was much more challenging on balance. A case can be easily made for us being a 1 or 2 loss team in the B1G this year. If you remove Michigan from the equation, MSU is the other team who can be considered in the top tier, and they have to travel to UCLA, USC, OSU, and Iowa this year (and have a home/away with UM).