Illinois 116, Ottawa 65 (Exhibition) Postgame

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#126      
BashCtIllini
21ChampaignSt said:
I don't know. Silly thing to quibble over. But the original point was big men always get forgotten in blowouts. Already showed that wasn't true. Now, you're saying big men always get forgotten in exhibitions. Well, just a look at Kofi's exhibition box scores shows that's not true. So now the "rule" might evolve to something like, "Big men don't perform well in exhibitions unless they're really good." To which I say, I think Dain is really good which is why it stood out to me that he didn't play well.

It was one exhibition game. Possibly and probably meaningless. But I'll stand by two things: There is no rule that big men don't have good games in exhibitions or blow outs. And Dain's energy left something to be desired on Friday.
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To me, the only thing you can learn from these low level exhibition games is bad things. You're expected to destroy them and look good doing it. If you don't, that could be concerning. Well we had no bad things, so that in and of itself is a positive.

Assuming guys who looked good, will be good, that is a bit of a stretch at this point. Need more data to determine that.
 
#127      
Birdus
I am more positive about this team than last year. I think we compete for a BIG TITLE again this year. We may not win it but I like the makeup of this team. Older more experienced. They will win a lot of games that they shouldn't win but will also lose less of the games that they should win because of experience and less over-confidence. Defense will be a great plus on this team. I like it from 1-12.
 
#128      
IlliniRunIn07
Fun game to watch but trying not to get too excited. The one positive to take away is how quick guys were to move the ball. I think you can replicate that throughout the year against better competition. But tough to take anything else away. Not sure there was a potential rebound that we didn’t get. They were obviously outmatched
 
#129      
Ransom Stoddard
IlliniRunIn07 said:
Fun game to watch but trying not to get too excited. The one positive to take away is how quick guys were to move the ball. I think you can replicate that throughout the year against better competition. But tough to take anything else away. Not sure there was a potential rebound that we didn’t get. They were obviously outmatched
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Yep, tough to take anything away. I think there would have been better competition in a pickup game at the ARC.
 
#130      
jjv0004
I would maybe slow my roll on this team. They played a glorified high school team. Let's see what happens against Kansas.
 
#131      
drsmitty74
jjv0004 said:
I would maybe slow my roll on this team. They played a glorified high school team. Let's see what happens against Kansas.
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Tonight Show Reaction GIF by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon

Let us have our cake while there is cake to be had.
 
#132      
ptgrd23
Every team needs glue guys who forgo the bright light to do the little things to make everybody else better

Steve Bardo
Matt Heldman/Brian Johnson
Roger Powell
Jacob Grandison/Damonte Williams

Last year we had a lot of players who only played for themselves.

Sencire, Ty and Luke were willing to play the role glue guy but Luke was injured and Sencire/Ty were only part time players

I am psyched that all the new transfers appear to be willing to sacrifice for the team - Marcus, Quincy, and Justin.
 
#133      
cjw1901
Illini B-Ball Fan said:
Good analysis and it would be more efficient for us and possibly win more games if we shot more 2s. Yet, as you know, the greater majority of NBA shots are 3s, thus college players tend to try their best to become proficient in that area to impress the NBA scouts.
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Right, but word is that this phenomena has changed recently (in the last year or so) in the NBA too and last NBA season was the first season where NBA teams are now scoring more per possession on 2s than they are on 3s. So the roughly decade-long continued increase in 3pt shooting at the NBA level has stopped and may be starting to trend downward slightly.
 
#134      
SkyysNotFalling
It’s not about who we played it’s about HOW we played. Ty Rodgers grabbing a rebound and leading the break. TJ running his lane for Coleman’s no-look assist. Domask diving on the floor for a loose ball. Hansberry following his miss with and-one put back. DGL playing aggressive. Harmon knocking down a corner catch-and-shoot three. Winning players made winning play after winning play. Things like that translate no matter who is in front of us. It was a delight to see.
 
#135      
aaeismacgychel
cjw1901 said:
But Grandpa, let's do a little math on that. I'm afraid last season (ever since Kofi left really), we've been in big trouble on this issue. This Ottawa exhibition game just shows nothing has changed this season (at least, not yet):

Points per shot on 2s: (31/36)*2=1.722 pts
Points per shot on 3s: (14/42)*3=1.000 pts

So, based on these averages, we gave up 0.722 pts each time we chose to shoot a 3, when we could have shot a 2. That's pretty dumb basketball! (Yes, I'm assuming we don't turn it over by working for a 2 and so on, but that stuff is small potatoes compared to the main numbers shown above, and it's also compensated by increased rebounding chances on 2s.)

What is worse is that we made that same mistake in about 80% of our games last season. Yes, I ran all of them in a spreadsheet this afternoon. And the worst part is that Underwood knows it, and he acknowledged it in the postgame interview (at least on this Ottawa game), and he has acknowledged it more generally in the past, so he knows the big picture on this issue too.

The crazy part is that we don't have to do that. Dain's FG percentage led the team last season. We're also pretty good at driving (TSJ, CH, TR, SH). Rogers and Dain do a great job avoiding 3s. (Yeah, we know why for them.) But for the other guys, they have to sense it more. Goode sensed it in the first half. He was ON, and kept shooting, which made sense. But after that first made 3 in the second half, Goode went cold. He should have limited himself after a couple misses. I was surprised and disappointed there, since I figured Goode would limit himself to great looks when he went a little cold, but he didn't. And as a team we also took too many 3s overall, especially in a game where it was obvious that we were killing it on 2s (partly because of a big height and size advantage and partly because we were beating them off the dribble and by interior passing). Yeah, that was mostly Underwood's fault, since coaches know that stuff way early and should have everybody ready for what their team's big advantages are each game. Underwood didn't.

Yeah, I know. We killed them anyway. But I want to beat KU and Marquette and a bunch of awesome teams. We can't overshoot 3s this season, like we did in about 80% of our games last season. That means it is high time to think about this stuff and limit ourselves to great looks from 3 for our best shooters and even they need to sense it when they are going cold and, when this happens, go to the hole or our big men or cutters instead. Goode and some others didn't, and they better figure this out soon.
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I agree with you on the efficiency metrics that it's pretty clear that if you aren't at the absolute bare minimum a 33% shooter from 3pt range, you're costing your team points by regularly taking that shot. And if you want to be a Top 25 team, you really want to be shooting it at 36% or better. Last year's team has a 1.10ppp from 2 and a 0.92ppp from 3. It was clear and apparent to most where the vast majority of our shooting should have been coming from especially considering the quality of shot we were taking from 3 last season.

As for this game against Ottawa, I would not be concerned quite yet on the number of threes attempted. Reason being, we were moving the ball well, getting everyone on offense involved, and getting high quality looks from behind the arc. Yes, we would have been more efficient and won by even more if we just used our size and strength to pound the paint, or even just given the ball to TSJ every possession and had him drive as Ottawa had nobody who could stop him. But to be real, that wasn't the point of the exhibition.

The whole point of playing this team was to gauge how the players interact with each other across different lineups, what their decision making and effort level was like, and evaluating gaps in what you've been running in practice vs how it's being played in real time. Overall, I think we outperformed for the most part, though several of our players' defense is going to need some work. Outside shooting efficiency is likely to continue to be an issue this year. The question though is whether we are still intent on putting up 20+ threes a game? And while yes, we put up 42 this game, I think it's far from a sure thing this is going to happen when we play real games. Our shot selection against Kansas should be more telling though on this end.

Overall I agree with you, we need to greatly decrease our number of 3pt attempts, but I'm going to need another couple games to see how much of a 3pt chucking team we really are. Just think this Ottawa game and the Spain trip are a bit early to form the conclusion we'll be similar to how we were last year on that end. That said, if we put up another 30+ 3pt attempts against Kansas, then yeah, I'll be getting a bit more nervous.
 
#137      
foby
SkyysNotFalling said:
It’s not about who we played it’s about HOW we played. Ty Rodgers grabbing a rebound and leading the break. TJ running his lane for Coleman’s no-look assist. Domask diving on the floor for a loose ball. Hansberry following his miss with and-one put back. DGL playing aggressive. Harmon knocking down a corner catch-and-shoot three. Winning players made winning play after winning play. Things like that translate no matter who is in front of us. It was a delight to see.
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The 3 on the floor for the loose ball at about the 10:30 mark in the first half was awesome. This team is 100% bought in.
 
#138      
cjw1901
SkyysNotFalling said:
It’s not about who we played it’s about HOW we played. Ty Rodgers grabbing a rebound and leading the break. TJ running his lane for Coleman’s no-look assist. Domask diving on the floor for a loose ball. Hansberry following his miss with and-one put back. DGL playing aggressive. Harmon knocking down a corner catch-and-shoot three. Winning players made winning play after winning play. Things like that translate no matter who is in front of us. It was a delight to see.
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Right, I enjoyed those plays.

On the other hand, we also saw Ty's unnecessary no-look pass in the lane (that resulted in TO, if I'm remembering that one right). I just re-watch a CH bounce pass from the floor at 10:32 left in the 1st half. (Good grief! Who attempts a bounce from the floor? I know. CH.) BTW, this was right after a CH pass to a cutting Goode (at 10:53 left in the 1st half) where Goode had his head facing away from CH, but CH dangerously passed him the ball anyway (which easily could have been a TO). Luckily, in this case, Goode turned at the last second and saw the pass coming and got it off to Domask in the corner. Yeah, that pass from CH is in the Underwood's offense I'm sure, but it still looked dangerous as hell.

Plays like that have you wondering who was doing the stats for that game and whether CH 2 TOs in this game was really accurate. (To me, it looks it wasn't, and CH is back to his normal 4+ TOs per game larging coming from travels (or near travels) almost every time he gets the ball and, by the time the game is over, a whole slew of dangerous passes by him.

So yeah, there were some really great plays in this game, but there were some of the same sloppy and questionable plays we've seen for years in this game. And those will likely go way up in number once we face a real opponent (in just 5 days now).
 
#139      
RockfordIllini
Agree we shot too many 3s. But a lot of those were when the game was out of hand. Understandable would lose a little focus and resort to chucking at that point.

But 7-17 in the first half, with most if not all coming off of ball movement and within the flow of the offense was encouraging.
 
#140      
OB positive
RockfordIllini said:
Agree we shot too many 3s. But a lot of those were when the game was out of hand. Understandable would lose a little focus and resort to chucking at that point.

But 7-17 in the first half, with most if not all coming off of ball movement and within the flow of the offense was encouraging.
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It was also nice to see us going after the rebound on some of the threes we missed. Don't remember seeing that too much last year.
 
#141      
Guest
Mfk3.gif


I don't even know exactly what you guys are talking about but I love this GIF (and Phineas and Ferb)
 
#142      
pruman91
Finally got around to watching replay of exhibition game and the audio sucks bigtime....
Glad I listened to Illini radio feed...
Is this indicative of normal B1G + audio ??

Asking for NL # 3 and myself....
 
#143      
foby
pruman91 said:
Finally got around to watching replay of exhibition game and the audio sucks bigtime....
Glad I listened to Illini radio feed...
Is this indicative of normal B1G + audio ??

Asking for NL # 3 and myself....
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It happens on at least 1 of their broadcasts every year. Hopefully it's cleared up for the rest.
 
#145      
GallopingGhost
I always love beating a team by 50. We looked good doing it. There are some teams around D1 that did not as flashy against lesser talent.

I think we will have a lot more to talk about after next Sunday. Go Illini!
 
#146      
cjw1901
RockfordIllini said:
Agree we shot too many 3s. But a lot of those were when the game was out of hand. Understandable would lose a little focus and resort to chucking at that point.

But 7-17 in the first half, with most if not all coming off of ball movement and within the flow of the offense was encouraging.
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Right, none of this matters when IL blows out an opponent 116 to 65, as we did in this game (or anything close to that). Heck, be happy if we just win, which I admit we definitely did by a wide margin against Ottawa.

But you caught my complaint on shooting too many 3s in about 80% of our games last season, right? Okay, but I'm complaining about a bunch of other wins there too, so let me ignore about half of those, and just focus in on our 13 losses from last season.

I added that to the spreadsheet tonight, got score differentials (always negative for an IL loss by my convention), then I added what more we would have scored in those games had we maximized our scoring based on whichever shots (2s or 3s) was proving most effective for us in that game (which I forced to be always positive to maximize our score). Sure, this assumes we could make real-time adjustments to our shot selection w/o altering these percentages and/or changing the quality of these shots. The result was that out of our 13 losses last season we could have won 12 of them! The only game that looked unwinnable this way was the game we lost at Indiana by 3 pts, in a game where we struck almost a perfect balance in our pts-per-shot on 2s vs. our pts-per-shot on 3s, so maximizing this couldn't much help us.

So, unless you figure that the Illini are going undefeated this season, then, as soon as we lose (say this coming Sunday against KU or two games later against Marquette or eventually, if you stick with having at least one loss on the season), then that loss (or those losses) probably would have been turned into a win (or wins) had we just maximized our scoring in this way.

BTW, if you are really thinking about this deeply, and you are thinking this "maximizing" means going all or nothing on the 3s, then you are on the right track. Basically, in these extremes, it means we are literally getting all 2s because we figured out (near the very start of the game) we do that best on that night. Or, conversely and more rarely, we figure out that we're killing it from 3 and we go with nothing but 3s since near the start of the game, since that was working for us that night. And, yes, the maximization requires that our opponents don't notice that we went all-in on 2s (more often) or we went all-in-on-3s (less often) and they keep guarding us just the same, but that essentially what is happening when this stuff is maximized. To keep it sane though, the difference in the losing score and maximizing or scoring often didn't require us to get every last point in this way. For example, if we left even 4 pts unacquired by mixing thing up (to confuse our defending opponents), then we could have still won 9 of the 13 games we lost last season. And even less predictably, had we left 18 points unacquired, we still could have won 8 of the 13 games we lost last season. That could mean going about 20+8=28 wins and just 13-8=5 losses (not counting the very likely extension of our BT and NCAA tourney play). That is certainly nothing to sneeze at, something I think Underwood would be wise to do. Simply pay more attention to what is working that night go with it. Most of time, this simply means "stop shooting so darn many 3s when your team isn't that good at shooting 3s". That simple logic could have won us a bunch of games we lost last season, and it can work the same this season too (even with Goode heathy and Domask on the team), if we wise up.
 
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#147      
illini80
GallopingGhost said:
I always love beating a team by 50. We looked good doing it. There are some teams around D1 that did not as flashy against lesser talent.

I think we will have a lot more to talk about after next Sunday. Go Illini!
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These practice games are fun and something to talk about, but I have zero confidence they will mean anything as the season unfolds. I’m ready for the real games to start! Men’s and Women’s.

Excited Lets Go GIF by NOW WE'RE TALKING TV SERIES
 
#148      
Rap47
Would the Illini have won all the games the games they did by your method?
 
#149      
skyIdub
cjw1901 said:
Right, none of this matters when IL blows out an opponent 116 to 65, as we did in this game (or anything close to that). Heck, be happy if we just win, which I admit we definitely did by a wide margin against Ottawa.

But you caught my complaint on shooting too many 3s in about 80% of our games last season, right? Okay, but I'm complaining about a bunch of other wins there too, so let me ignore about half of those, and just focus in on our 13 losses from last season.

I added that to the spreadsheet tonight, got score differentials (always negative for an IL loss by my convention), then I added what more we would have scored in those games had we maximized our scoring based on whichever shots (2s or 3s) was proving most effective for us in that game (which I forced to be always positive to maximize our score). Sure, this assumes we could make real-time adjustments to our shot selection w/o altering these percentages and/or changing the quality of these shots. The result was that out of our 13 losses last season we could have won 12 of them! The only game that looked unwinnable this way was the game we lost at Indiana by 3 pts, in a game where we struck almost a perfect balance in our pts-per-shot on 2s vs. our pts-per-shot on 3s, so maximizing this couldn't much help us.

So, unless you figure that the Illini are going undefeated this season, then, as soon as we lose (say this coming Sunday against KU or two games later against Marquette or eventually, if you stick with having at least one loss on the season), then that loss (or those losses) probably would have been turned into a win (or wins) had we just maximized our scoring in this way.

BTW, if you are really thinking about this deeply, and you are thinking this "maximizing" means going all or nothing on the 3s, then you are on the right track. Basically, in these extremes, it means we are literally getting all 2s because we figured out (near the very start of the game) we do that best on that night. Or, conversely and more rarely, we figure out that we're killing it from 3 and we go with nothing but 3s since near the start of the game, since that was working for us that night. And, yes, the maximization requires that our opponents don't notice that we went all-in on 2s (more often) or we went all-in-on-3s (less often) and they keep guarding us just the same, but that essentially what is happening when this stuff is maximized. To keep it sane though, the difference in the losing score and maximizing or scoring often didn't require us to get every last point in this way. For example, if we left even 4 pts unacquired by mixing thing up (to confuse our defending opponents), then we could have still won 9 of the 13 games we lost last season. And even less predictably, had we left 18 points unacquired, we still could have won 8 of the 13 games we lost last season. That could mean going about 20+8=28 wins and just 13-8=5 losses (not counting the very likely extension of our BT and NCAA tourney play). That is certainly nothing to sneeze at, something I think Underwood would be wise to do. Simply pay more attention to what is working that night go with it. Most of time, this simply means "stop shooting so darn many 3s when your team isn't that good at shooting 3s". That simple logic could have won us a bunch of games we lost last season, and it can work the same this season too (even with Goode heathy and Domask on the team), if we wise up.
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#150      
Battle89
skyIdub said:
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I did read the whole thing, and enjoyed the analysis, but yes it was long. Readers Digest version:

Most of time, this simply means "stop shooting so darn many 3s when your team isn't that good at shooting 3s". That simple logic could have won us a bunch of games we lost last season, and it can work the same this season too (even with Goode heathy and Domask on the team), if we wise up.
 
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