Illinois Basketball 2008-2009: Month 1 Review

Illini basketball is currently on a 10-day hiatus for final exams after playing 10 games. They certainly exceeded my expectations, as they currently boast a 9-1 record with their only loss coming by a mere 2 points. It turns out that Georgia was a pushover but the other 4 games were competitive, as expected. I will try to do a month 2 preview a little later, but I might not get the chance since I will be on travel and it is tough to make a detailed posting using only an iPhone.

Let's take a look at the rotation and cumulative stats and see what was unexpected or interesting about the first month of the season. As always, I am using stats available on fightingillini.com .

Rotation (minutes per game):
The rotation hasn't offered many surprises. The only major deviation from preseason expecations is that Calvin Brock only gets 16 mpg compared to the expected 24 mpg. Last year he got 22.1 mpg so his role has diminished. He is struggling with his shooting (.383 FG%, .200 3PT%, and .533 FT%) so he is spending more time on the bench.

FG%/FGA:
The two players with the most FGA are Mike Davis and Demetri McCamey, who uncoincidentally are our leading scorers. At least that means we don't have any chuckers on the team who are killing our offense. Of our 9-man rotation, the worst FG% is Brock at .383 and the best is Keller at .560. Maybe we should get Keller some more shots. Perhaps the most notable thing is that our team FG% so far has improved to .474 from .435 last year. That is substantial improvement.

3PT%/3PA:
Our only notable 3-point shooters are our 3 starting guards. That is probably how it should be. One disturbing stat is that McCamey has the most 3PA but only makes 29.8% of his 3's. This suggests that Demetri is falling in love with the 3 a bit and should hold off from trying contested or off-rhythm bombs. Frazier is limiting his 3's and as such is shooting nearly 40%. Meacham is doing a great job taking a lot of 3's and making nearly 44% of them.

FT%/FTA:
We are making 71% of our free throws this year compared to only 61% last year. That is a big improvement, although we have been slipping a bit lately. Thankfully, some of that is because our garbage time players are bringing down the average. Most of our main guys are very solid at the line and I have total confidence in them this year.

Rebounds:
Rebounding has become a big weakness lately. The bottom line is that Mike Davis is our only solid rebounder with his 8.7 rpg. Tisdale and the backup big men need to step it up because we are letting up a lot of second chance points in the paint. That could lead to a lot of defeats in month 2.

Assists:
All 3 of our starting guards have at least a 1.8 A/TO ratio. Chester Frazier has a silly number of assists so far and has been doing an outstanding job.

Points:
We have four players averaging at least 9.9 ppg: Davis, McCamey, Meacham, and Tisdale. We are getting a solid, balanced scoring output from our starters. Frazier is more a distributor but he fills that role well. The key is to get a little more consistency and balance on a game-to-game basis, as some wild fluctuations have sort of averaged themselves out.

Super sophomores?

One of the biggest questions this year would be how our sophomores develop. Not only are they key players this season, but they will lay the foundation for the next two seasons. We have seven sophomores on the roster so let's look at how they are doing so far.

Mike Davis - 29.6 mpg, 14.9 ppg, 9.4 rpg, 1.4 apg
Demetri McCamey - 32.6 mpg, 13.1 ppg, 3.1 rpg, 4.3 apg
Mike Tisdale - 22.1 mpg, 8.6 ppg, 4.7 rpg, 0.3 apg
Richard Semrau - 15.1 mpg, 2.7 ppg, 3.1 rpg, 0.4 apg
Jeff Jordan - 9.3 mpg, 1.1 ppg, 0.3 rpg, 0.3 apg
Bill Cole - 3.0 mpg, 0.6 ppg, 0.6 rpg, 0.3 apg
Alex Legion - not eligible

Our sophomore class combines for 56% of our minutes, 60% of our scoring (41/68 ppg), 65% of our rebounding (not counting team rebounds), and 40% of our assists. That is very solid.

5 of the 9 players in our rotation are sophomores. I think Legion takes all of Jordan's minutes, so I'm going to ignore both of them for now and focus on the four major contributors. McCamey, Davis, and Tisdale are starters and Semrau is a key backup.

The common thread with these four is that they all have talent but they also need to improve their overall game and their consistency. McCamey (23), Davis (28), and Tisdale (20) have already all had at least one 20-point game and Semrau has a high of 9. Nobody else on the team has broken the 20-point mark. All four have been shut down at times, with low scores of 8 for McCamey, 2 for Davis, and 0 for Tisdale and Semrau. McCamey gets very sloppy at times on both sides of the floor, Davis and Tisdale are both rail thin, and Semrau is still trying to gain confidence and needs to finish opportunities around the hoop.

Overall, I'd have to say that these four have performed better than expected (McCamey may be about what we expected) and have been the reason for the somewhat surprising 6-1 start. Davis is a budding star, Tisdale is a clutch finisher, and Semrau is our muscle in the post.

Add two more years and Alex Legion to this group and you have an NCAA Tournament team. Add two more classes of stud recruits (including the redshirting Simpson) and you have a special team. If the future looked bright a month ago, it is going supernova now.