5 interesting observations from the Illinois basketball loss to Alabama

3. Don’t take too much stock in this loss

I wanted to piggyback off the last side by saying, don’t take too much stock in the loss to Alabama on Wednesday. While it is a loss and losing is never fun, there are multiple reasons not to panic about this Illinois basketball team.

For one, that is an Alabama team that is special. They aren’t going to be a first-round out in the NCAA tournament. This Crimson Tide program is going to go deep in March, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see them win the national championship.

The bigger reason for not putting too much stock into this loss to Alabama is the fact that Illinois is still a new team. We can’t expect the Illini to come out and look like world-beaters.

Illinois brought in an entirely new roster, minus Dra Gibbs-Lawhorn. So, all but 17 minutes in the Alabama game didn’t even play for the Orange and Blue last season. Even with Gibbs-Lawhorn, he hasn’t played with any of the new guys, so everyone is new together.

With that much new talent, it is going to take time to gel. I was a little happy to see Kasparas Jakucionis go through some struggles against Oakland so he could improve on his weakness, and that same mentality applies to Illinois against the Crimson Tide.

The fact that Illinois struggled against Alabama isn’t fun, but it also exposed what we need to correct and get better at to compete with the top dogs in the sport. Alabama is a much faster and well-oiled machine. We now know what speed we need to play at and where our defensive deficiencies are on the court.

Wednesday night was a good learning experience. Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up. We fell against Alabama, and now we can pull together to pick ourselves up and move forward and learn.