The Illinois basketball team moved to 3-1 on Friday night, but it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows.
Sam Houston shouldn’t be in the same ballpark as Illinois, talent-wise. The Illini have more bodies up and down the roster, but the Bearkats kept up with the Orange and Blue for most of the night.
If you are an Illinois fan, you know Brad Underwood wasn’t going to be happy with the performance. He laid it all out in the postgame press conference.
“It is a challenge right now, from my seat, with communication. I cannot get this group to talk.
Illinois has a lot of young players. There are a handful of experienced players on the roster, but when you aren’t on the floor, you can’t do much in the way of helping with the communication issue.
“Our three best communicators are Tomi (Tomislav Ivisic), Mirk (David Mirkovic), and Jake (Davis). Two of them are not playing. When you talk, you solve problems, and we have a lot of guys not doing that.”
The youth and newness of the Illinois roster seem to be the underlying issue. There are so many freshmen on the court, and they are all making an impact in some form or fashion.
Illinois starts multiple freshmen, and in the regular rotation, you are looking at five freshmen who play consistent minutes. You mix those in with the transfer portal addition of Stefan Vaaks and the injuries to two of your best communicators, and you have a recipe for a communications disaster.
“We have a lot of guys playing well, but we are allowing too many fundamental mistakes in our processes just because we don’t talk. Tonight, we had a couple of trips where we were mixing up some zone, and throwing that in there and trying to work on that. We had two or three guys who didn’t know what defense we were in. That is just a communication breakdown, which is ultimately my responsibility.”
Sam Houston’s stat line shows the lack of communication coming from the Illinois basketball team
It is hard to quantify communication. There isn’t a stat that shows how many times a player calls out a screen or tells his teammate to rotate.
When I watched the game against Sam Houston, and now looking at the box score, there is one number that does stand out to me when it comes to lack of communication.
The Bearkats shot 13-of-33, 42%, from three-point range. I think this number screams no communication. Sam Houston had a ton of open three-point attempts against Illinois, and it was a major reason this game was close for most of the contest.
In transition, Illinois didn’t communicate well about who was taking who, and this left easy transition buckets. When Sam Houston was in halfcourt sets, the communication on rotations was off, and this allowed them to pass the ball around and find an open man.
There is no doubt in my mind that Underwood will get the communication issue fixed. This is a new and young team, and there are plenty of non-conference games left. If this is how Illinois looks with bad communication, just imagine how we will play when we are talking.
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