3/9/2019 1 Comment End of the Regular SeasonThe Illini basketball season is almost over as they play their last regular season game on Sunday March 10th against the Penn State Nittany Lions. After a solid stretch of wins and big games throughout the middle of the season the Illini's luck started to run out. Since the last blog, the team has only won 1 of their last 5 games. Two of those games were against ranked opponents so a win was not likely. However, the other two loses were against Penn State and Indiana who are both below Illinois in the Big Ten standings. Their only win came against the Northwestern Wildcats who are at the bottom of the Big Ten. The final score of the game as 81-76 with Andres Feliz leading the team with 26 points, followed Ayo Dosunmu and Georgi Bezhanishvili both with 12 points. The Illini played well throughout the game, but it should have been a fairly easy game since Northwestern is at the bottom of the conference. The team lead going into the half with a score of 39-27, and they ended up getting outscored by the Wildcats in the second half, however the lead was to great for the Illini to lose. The first loss the Illini took since the last blog was against Wisconsin, with a score of 58-64. The team played a pretty good game throughout, they were just unable to finish the win in the second half, which seems like a theme for this season. The team was leading going into half with a score of 26-25, but the Badgers outplayed them in the second half. Ayo Dosunmu lead the team with just 13 points, followed by Aaron Jordan with 12. Just like the last time the Illini faced the Badgers, they were able to hold their star player Ethan Happ to under 10 points. Happ has only scored under 10 points two times this season, and both of those times were against the Illini. The next game the Illini played was at home against the Penn State Nittany Lions. Penn State is one of the worst teams right now in the Big Ten so a win was expected. However, the team never seemed to show up. The final score of the game was 76-83. Dosunmu lead the team yet again with 18 points, followed by Feliz with 17 and Bezhanishvili with 16. The Illini were pretty much out of it from the beginning and never showed any sort of promise to come back. They went into the half losing 32-39 and weren't able to recover. Their next game was against one of the top teams in the Big Ten, the Purdue Boilermakers. As I have said so many times before, the Illini started off super strong, going into the half with a 33-32 lead against a top team in the nation, but the second half came and they got absolutely demolished, getting outscored 23-41. Dosunmu and Feliz were tied for the most points with only 9 for the game. Their most recent loss came at home on senior night for the Illini against the Indiana Hoosiers. In this game the Illini were out of it from the start, the Hoosiers were leading 42-52 going into the locker room. The second half was no different, the Illini ended up losing 74-92. As usual, Dosunmu and George lead the team with 16 and 15 points. This was a dissapointing loss against a Hoosier team that hasn't had that great of a year either. The last regular season game is away against Penn State, hopefully the Illini can turn it around after what happened last time. After that game up next will be the Big Ten Tournament which the Illini aren't expected to go too far in. This will likely be the last time we see the Illini play this season since they haven't performed nearly well enough to make either the NCAA tournament or the NIT. Hopefully next year they will be able to turn it around with some more experienced players and new recruits.
1 Comment
William Akpan
3/14/2019 07:02:58 am
Wow! What a great blog. When I first started reading your blogs, I wasn't very interested in college basketball and after reading I'm still not, but I know this information anyway and you did a really good job of conveying that to your audience. The images that you used actually did a great job on showing what happened in the game even though, it was just a moment of time during the game.
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