The Illinois basketball team finally made it over the hump this season and made it to the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament, and on Thursday night, they punched their ticket to the Elite 8. The Fighting Illini knocked off two seed Iowa State basketball in a close battle. The game came down to the wire, and Illinois won 72-69. Now, the Fighting Illini will take on one seed UConn for a spot in the Final Four.
There are a lot of good teams left in the NCAA Tournament, but no one has looked more dominant than UConn basketball so far. Illinois basketball has looked good, and they found a way to beat a gritty Iowa State team on Thursday.
“Yeah, they're really gritty,” Illinois head coach Brad Underwood said of Iowa State. “They're not the number one defense because they don't play hard and don't make runs on people. They keep fighting. I'm really excited because we did it without Terrence [Shannon Jr.]. Terrence was on the bench. I worry about Terrence being out defensively more than I do offensively. Dain Dainja came in and made some big plays, Luke Goode big three, Marcus [Domask] an and one. But defensively, we got stops when we needed to. We went a little bigger. Coleman Hawkins is guarding a perimeter player in Jones and it looked different, but I'm proud that we were bigger and found a way to do it.”
One issue that the Fighting Illini will have to fix against UConn is free throw shooting. Illinois was 15-29 at the charity stripe, and the ending could've been a lot less stressful if they had made more free throws.
“Well, we're up 10 at half and we can't make a free throw,” Brad Underwood continued. “And Terrence, who's an 80 plus percent free throw shooter, has missed a bunch, and you can't do that, you you've got to make free throws. It felt like we could have been up 18-20 at half. We got great shots. We had great ball movement. Didn't make them. So you gotta fight and you gotta have some resiliency to figure out how to do it.”
Illinois will play UConn on Saturday night
Now, Illinois basketball is moving on and shifting their focus to UConn basketball, the number one overall seed in the NCAA Tournament. Marcus Domask knows that the Fighting Illini are underdogs, but it doesn't bother him.
“But we haven’t had our chance yet,” Marcus Domask said, according to an article from The Athletic. “I’ve played a lot of teams that are supposed to beat us. We want to come out of the gate and show them that we’re different. We don’t want to let them get up big on us early and then all of a sudden they get all the confidence like they’ve been there before and they’ll do it again. I think it’s really important that we just come out and set the tone. We’ve played a lot of basketball, so we should have a lot of confidence in ourselves and each other too.”
Unfortunately for Illinois, they have just one day to prepare for the Huskies. Brad Underwood was asked how you beat a team that good, and he didn't have an answer at that time.
“I don't know yet,” Underwood said in regards to how to beat UConn basketball. “You know, you're gonna play somebody good. It doesn't matter whether it's UConn, they're number one, or it's somebody in the other bracket, you're gonna play somebody really good that's obviously playing well. They're the defending national champions. Ton of respect for Danny [UConn head coach Dan Hurley] and what he's done and the fact that he's continued to do it after winning, but we play in the Big Ten. We play a lot of really, really good teams playing in lot of really, really great environments. And you gotta have toughness to win and some grit and we're gonna have to have all that. We'll be ready.”
UConn and Illinois will tip off from TD Garden in Boston, Massachusetts at 6:09 ET on Saturday evening. The Huskies are currently favored by 8.5 points.
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