Illinois Basketball: 5 observations from the Illini win over Lindenwood

4. RJ Melendez is hitting his stride

The ending to the 2021-22 campaign was not great. We fell in the second round of the NCAA tournament for the second year in a row. But there was some good that came out of that postseason. The emergence of RJ Melendez was one of those good things.

Melendez showed Illini fans that he was going to be a special player for this program. He was one of the best players we had in that NCAA tournament, and coming into the 2022-23 campaign, I was expecting big things out of him.

But Melendez’s season has started slowly. In the first five games, he failed to hit double-digit points, his turnovers were up, and he was fouling a lot. He just wasn’t playing good basketball.

We started to see glimpses of Melendez starting to knock off some rust against Virginia, though. He ended up finishing with eight points on 2-of-4 from three-point range. In that game, he looked like the old Melendez.

I wanted to see the improvement for Melendez continue on Friday night against Lindenwood. This was his chance to finally knock off the rest of the rust. Melendez did just that, as he had his best game of the season.

Melendez would end up dominating the game against the Lions. He would finish with 17 points, four rebounds, one assist, and one block while shooting 7-of-11 from the field and 2-of-5 from three-point range.

I loved what I saw out of Melendez. It also started to feel like he has developed a nice chemistry with the newcomers on the team. I think this was probably the biggest issue to start the year. This team is starting to gel, and that is helping Melendez tremendously.