A short-handed No. 5 Nebraska men’s basketball team lost it’s fist game of the season Tuesday at No. 3 Michigan, but the Huskers will get another chance at a top-10 win Sunday when No. 9 Illinois travels to Lincoln.
Tipoff is set for 3 p.m. CT on FS1 with Kevin Kugler and Nick Bahe on the call. The radio broadcast will be on the Husker Radio Network.
Sunday is the first time the Huskers have hosted a top-10 matchup in Lincoln and just the third top-10 matchup in school history.
“We’re gonna have our hands full,” Coach Fred Hoiberg said of Illinois. “We are going to have to come out and get off to a good start.”
Illinois coach Brad Underwood also spoke glowingly of the Huskers ahead of Sundays rematch.
“A very very good team with an excellent basketball coach,” Underwood said. “We expect a terrific environment and we’ll have to play well.”
Injury Update
A shorthanded Husker team on Tuesday could get back key pieces in Rienk Mast and Braden Frager. Mast missed the Michigan game due to illness but is trending in the right direction after spending some time in the emergency room earlier this week due to dehydration.
“If he responds well the rest of the day and has a good day tomorrow, we anticipate him being out there Sunday, not knowing exactly what he’s going to be able to give us,” Fred Hoiberg said on Friday. “Obviously, he’s lost a ton of weight. He’s still very weak, but it was good to see him. It was good to see him back in the gym today.”
Frager, who has been nursing an ankle injury he suffered against Washington, looks to be close to returning to the lineup.
“He was back on the court today (Friday) for a portion of the contact drills,” Hoiberg said of Frager. “He went through stations yesterday and did a little bit of work on the floor today. We got him out about halfway through, but it was good to get him some live reps. We’ll see how he responds to it.”
Ugnius Jaruševičius, who has played in just one game this season due to a back injury, will be listed as out once again for Illinois, this time because of illness.
“We are deciding to keep him home,” Hoiberg said. “Obviously, he’s not playing right now, but we’re doing everything we can to stop the spread of it. We’re all battling some form of it, but Rienk, whatever he got was nasty.”
The flu and stomach bug, what Hoiberg has called it, has ravaged the team in the last week. The illness is something that is a concern for Hoiberg at this point in the season.
“We’ve had some guys that it’s a little bit different,” Hoiberg said after the Michigan loss. “Rienk’s was more stomach-related, then everybody else is kind of dealing with the head stuff right now.”
The illness isn’t an excuse for Hoiberg, who knows that a lot of teams in college basketball go through sicknesses and “everybody is dealing with it this time of year.”
Revenge Game
The Fighting Illini are tied atop the Big Ten standings with Michigan and Nebraska with just one loss in conference play.
Of course, that one Illinois loss came at the hands of the Huskers, 83-80 in Champaign on Dec. 13. Since that loss, the Illini have been on a roll, winning 10 straight, including one at Purdue, 88-82 on Jan. 24.
“We’ve gotten better at understanding who we are and what we want to be, really, but simply. What opportunities we want to give up on the defensive end and what we want to live with,” Underwood said of the changes to his team since the loss. “I think the other piece is we’ve got better role identification then we had at that point. We were still trying to get healthy, still trying to get in shape. December seemed like an eternity ago. It was a team that was searching then and I think we found some answers.”
Illinois has clearly responded well to some hard coaching and has become more connected since the Nebraska loss.
“I’ve seen this team come together as a collective group,” Illini senior Ben Humrichous said. “Our identity is that we are just going to compete. I’ve seen us continue to jell as a team. This is a team that is incredibly connected on and off the court. This is a group that loves to play with one another. Right as this stretch of wins started, you just saw a bunch of people put an arm around another and say this is hard but we are going to attack this together.”
Illinois has a motto in its program of “the standard being the standard.” The loss to Nebraska clearly was a refocus point this season.
“The Nebraska loss started it all, we changed our mentality after that, ” freshman David Mirkovic said after the Illini’s win Thursday against Washington. “We started living for each other, playing harder defense, communicating more.”
Scouting Illinois
One of those differences in the Illini’s 10-game winning streak has been freshman Keaton Wagler.
With Kylan Boswell out with a broken hand, Wagler has stepped into a bigger role, including a 46-point performance in the Illini’s win at Purdue.
In the win over Washington on Thursday, the 6-foot-6 point guard had 22 points on 7-of-13 shooting and eight assists to just one turnover.
Wagler’s playmaking and passing ability, particularly when he drives to the basket, have been elite.
“He just makes the right play, takes what the defense gives him,” Hoiberg said. “He doesn’t force things, but he is also so talented. You get up on him, he finds a way to go around you. He’s got great pace on his moves. He’s never sped up. He’s just playing on a whole different planet right now.”
In conference play, nine games, Wagler is third in the league in points per game (21.3).
Offensively, the Illini have tremendous firepower with the top-ranked offensive efficiency rating in the nation per KenPom (130.2). They are averaging 85.4 points per game this season, good for second in the Big Ten behind Michigan’s 91.7.
One of the reasons Illinois has such a high offensive efficiency rating is it leads the league in offensive rebounding (13.4 per game). Their 12.8 offensive rebounds per game in Big Ten play also lead the conference. The 39.4 offensive rebounding percentage is fourth best nationally.
Not only is Illinois a great offensive team, but they are no slouch on the defensive end with a 99.2 defensive efficiency rating, good for 32nd nationally.
The Illini’s 3.9 blocks per game in conference play are third in the league, and their opponents’ average 2-point attempt distance is 7.1, good for ninth nationally.
Keys To the Game
Outside of the Huskers’ overall health and the availability of Mast and Frager, the biggest key to beating Illinois is limiting their second-chance points. In their most recent win at home against Washington, they won the second-chance point battle 22-4 over the Huskies.
“They got 19 second-chance points on us in the first go round,” Hoiberg said. “That’s the battle. You try to make them take as many contested shots as you can and try to do everything you can to finish off possessions.”
Hoiberg didn’t say the Huskers were lucky to win at Illinois, giving up as many second-chance points as they did, but the odds of beating Illinois again and giving up 19 of those is not great.
“They had a 44% offensive rebounding rate the first time we played and somehow we found a way to win,” Hoiberg said. “You’re not going to win against Illinois very often if you give them almost half of their possessions back after a miss.”
The second key is physicality, which ties into the rebounding rate. Nebraska will need to be the more physical team when it takes the floor Sunday. Illinois is long and athletic.
“It’s going to be a war on Sunday,” Hoiberg said. “How we respond, how we go out and hit — if they hit us first, it’s over. We’re not going to out-jump them, we’re not going to out-length them. We have to hit. We have to be the more physical team if we want a chance to win and that’s hard to do against Illinois.”
The third key is turnovers. Illinois doesn’t force turnovers defensively. In fact, they are last in the country (365th) at forcing turnovers (11.9% rate) and second to last in steal percentage (5.5%).
Conversely, the Illini have been very good at taking care of the ball offensively with the country’s eighth-best non-steal turnover percentage of 5.3. Their 14.1 overall turnover percentage ranks 22nd.
Nebraska forced eight Illinois turnovers in the first meeting, just below the Illinois average of 9.7 per game. Six of those eight turnovers were Nebraska steals.
“We talk a lot about deflecting shots,” Hoiberg said. “We have to deflect their passing as well and have really good hands to force looping passes to buy our rotations time.”
Converting turnovers to baskets or live-ball opportunities off of turnovers is something Hoiberg said they need to be better at on Sunday.
“We turned Michigan over 19 times in our game; now, we weren’t very efficient off of that,” Hoiberg said. ‘We had 13 live-ball steals that really didn’t amount to very much on the other end. So we’ve got to be more efficient. When we do create those opportunities, we have to be better in converting.”
