Illini survive first half scare, lock down Wofford in second half 78-64

I would like to take a moment to ask who ever does the ESPN.com college basketball highlights voice work, #32 on this team is Demetri McCamey, not McCarney or McCommie. Get it right, because he is having a pretty damn good season already, and last night's win over Wofford was his best game yet. DMAC had 21 points to lead all scorers and made a fantastic 3 as time expired in the first half to put the Illini up 3. He also had 4 boards and 4 assists (which is down from his usual average)

The Illini had trouble with Wofford in the first half, especially defense, as the Terrier screens opened up their perimeter shooters really well, and made the Illini pay for not keeping up, sinking 7 shots from behind the line in the first half. The Illini would fall behind by as much as 8 before they got a hold of themselves and brought it back to a tie in the closing minute of the first half, then of course the great shot by Demetri that put them up 3, 42-39

From there they really didn't look back, the defense played with much more intensity and discipline after halftime, and the scoring opened as the defense took Wofford out of their game, in the second half the Terriers would only score 25 points, and be held to only four 3's.

Its also worth noting that Tisdale made his first real scoring appearance last night with 12 points and 5 rebounds, still not the play we remember from last year, but much better than we have seen prior to this. Unfortunately Tis is still struggling to come down with boards more consistently, the bright side being that his defense is looking better.

Mike Davis recorded yet another double-double last night, with 16 points and 11 rebounds. This is getting to be so common place that I hardly even feel excited about this. I think we need to just come to a consensus that Mike Davis is really really good at basketball. Can we do that? Okay, good.

You can see that this game was the first real test of the year for the Illini just by looking at the box score, Bruce stuck with his starters much longer than he has had to in these other easy cupcake games, with only Brandon Paul not going over 30 minutes out of the starting 5. Paul was notably spelled by Jeff Jordan, possibly for his defense. Those 4 starters who played 30+ minutes combined for a total of 64 points, and the player with the most points off of the bench was Bill Cole with 4.

Clearly Bruce felt that he needed that play from his starters, and respected the talent of Wofford, who as we have admitted before took several good teams down to the wire. This Wofford team is better than I was willing to give them credit for, and they will score a huge upset sooner or later this season. Thankfully the Illini were not that team.

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