Huge win over a top 25 Illini team. Remember what I said about wanting to see how good we could be with a healthy Harper and Bailey and the "new" guy Grant playing? Think we just saw it in a convincing win against a talented top 25 team and we're now 4-1 with a healthy Harper in the B1G and 3-0 with a healthy Harper and Grant playing. Was great to see Harper back to early season form with 28/6/5/4 including 11-12 FTs and 7-15/3-5 and Ace playing a quietly good game with 18/11/2 and 3 blocks - and those rebounds were huge late in the game when they were pounding us on the boards. We didn't have a 3rd scorer until late when JW hit a bunch of FTs to finish with 13, but almost everyone contributed, including nice treys for Hayes and Martini, some good boards by LS, good D by JMike (and 4/4/2/1 in limited minutes), 5/7 for Grant (although that 2-10 was tough to watch) and some nice D by Dortch. Derkack and Acuff didn't do much, but that's ok.
And while we've lost Ogbole, we are now playing Dortch some, too, and he's contributing, especially on D. Still baffled on why Pike didn't start playing Grant and Dortch from the beginning of the season, especially since they're more athletic than most of the other supporting guys (at least vs. Hayes, Martini and Acuff; JMike, JW and Derkack are fairly athletic) and Pike is a D guy. I always thought we needed better defenders playing with Harper/Bailey as they're capable of carrying most of the offense - and we're certainly seeing much better D, IMO, the past few games (especially Michigan and tonight).
Anyway, now let's go on a serious run. We're not out of it until we're out of it. Thinking we finish at least 5-3 to get to 17-14/10-10, which isn't enough for the tourney, but is certainly enough to play in the B1G tourney (I assume we'd need to finish 7-1 to get to 19-12/12-8 to make the tourney) and maybe we'll see a miracle.
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