Illinois at Purdue preview: I don't know what I want.

Okay, obviously I want the Illini to win, but how reasonably can i expect them to? I find myself wresting with short term wants and slightly longer term expectations. With five games remaining on the schedule, the Illini are only favored in two of them. At Michigan and Minnesota at home, the others the Illini will be significant underdogs. The Illini are the fifth best team in a Big Ten that is very top heavy, right now. The Illini are the only Big Ten team that is unranked that even stands a chance to make the tournament, the nose dive NU took last night against heretofore winless Penn State sealed there fate as an NIT team, and from there no team is even above .500 in conference.

If the Illini beat Minnesota and Michigan, they are into the tournament, plain and simple, at least as I see it. If they don't then the Big Ten conference, which at one point was seen as the best conference in America, will only send four teams to the dance.

Thinking in those terms, how disappointed should I be if the Illini lose on Saturday? They aren't supposed to win after all, and seeing the way played against the Buckeyes in Columbus, it seems hard to think I should hold it against the Illini if they drop this one. Then comes the other impulse in me. This is the same Illini team that should have beaten Purdue when last they met in Champaign, that has beaten essentially this same lineup of Purdue players three out of the last seven times they have played (not exactly uncompetitive, and including a win in West Lafayette last year.) If they have done it before why can't they do it again? And since when have we been rooting for this team to do the absolute minimum required to make the dance? You see, I am a bit conflicted.

Last year the Illini held the Boilermakers to only 48 points in the win in the Assembly Hall. I think it is fair to say that defensively, this team is not at that same level as last year's. Last year's team however did not have Demetri McCamey playing like he is now, and seeing as he put 28 on the board against the Boilers just a month ago, he is going to be front and center again if the Illini want to win.

Matt Painter has his team running a man to man defense which features Lewis Jackson as the premier defender, he is hard to bear even coming off of his injury, and he will likely be all over Demetri on Saturday, a feature that this Purdue team did not have when they visited Champaign. That is if we even see all that much man to man. After the way the Illini wilted defensively  offensively against the 1-3-1 zone I don't see why any team wouldn't at least try and run it against the Illini from now on.

If we do see the zone again, we have to hope that D.J. Richardson doesn't have another uncharacteristically bad shooting day, just like he did against the Buckeyes.(0-7 from 3, and only 2-10 overall) and Mike Davis, Mike Tisdale, Bill Cole or Tyler Griffey or whoever is going to be in the soft spot of the zone under hoop are ready to catch some passes. Dropped passes and missed shots were just as important to the Illini falling flat on their faces as did the total lack of defense.

Robbie Hummel, like Jon Diebler, is a player that you cannot leave alone on the perimeter. He will, and has absolutely murdered teams with the three ball, and I don't want that to happen again. Although it seems the player on the hottest streak right now for PU is one JaJuan Johnson, he is at the level that Mike Davis was once at, can't miss mode. Someone on this team has to be able to defend him or possibly negate him underneath. Mike Tisdale, I am looking at you.

We are still sitting on the same team that we have been all year. A team that looks amazing when someone other than Demetri can carry some of the offensive load, and a team that can look completely beatable when there is only one player playing at the necessary level. We will see which one shows up on Saturday.