Illinois Basketball: 5 observations from the Illini loss to Ohio State

3. Illinois needs to start being smarter about their shots

It is fun to see a three-pointer go into the basket. It lights up the fans and it puts three points on the board. But that doesn’t happen all too often for the Illinois basketball program.

Early on in the Ohio State game, I tweeted out that Illinois has the three-point shooting confidence of Steph Curry and the ability of Shaq. I stand by that statement, as the program continues to chuck up three-point shots and not make them consistently.

Illinois needs to realize that we are not a three-point shooting team. We finished the Ohio State game going 6-of-29 from three-point range, which is 20.7%. As a team, we haven’t been over 40% from three-point range in a game since the first Indiana loss.

In fact, out of the past nine games, Illinois has shot sub-30% from three-point range in five contests. That is how bad things have gotten from beyond the three-point arc.

Illinois was shooting 31.4% from three-point range for the season. That ranks No. 315 out of 363 DI programs. Honestly, the three-point percentage wouldn’t be a big issue if we weren’t taking many three-pointers per game, but that isn’t the case.

On top of the Illini not being able to shoot the ball from deep, we are taking a ton of three-pointers per game. Illinois was averaging 25.1 three-pointers per contest heading into Sunday. That ranked No. 35 in the country. Ranking sub-300 in three-point percentage and in the top 40 in attempts is not a good combination.

We need to realize that we are bad at shooting three-pointers. Let’s start driving the ball and being more aggressive. It is time to change things up.