Good Morning, Illini Nation: About three-point shooting

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Jan. 25—Illinois made six three-pointers Thursday night against Maryland … out of 28 attempts. That’s a 21.4 percent success rate from deep. It’s the third time the Illini have shot worse than 30 percent from three this season and also the worst of the bunch. Illinois shot 22.1 percent beyond the arc against Maryland Eastern Shore and 23.6 percent against Little Rock.

Poor shooting nights against the Hawks and Trojans was fine. The average margin of victory for those two games was just more than 52 points.

Six three-pointers at 21.4 percent clip against Maryland was not fine. Not with the Terrapins able to get two points seemingly at will in the paint from either Julian Reese or Derik Queen.

Poor shooting from the perimeter has become a trend for Illinois. Including Thursday night’s struggles, the Illini are shooting just 29.4 percent from three-point range in Big Ten play. That ranks 17th in the league ahead of only Washington.

“Maybe teams will quit guarding and let us shoot them,” Illinois coach Brad Underwood said. “I don’t know. I don’t have a reason. We’ve got to keep shooting them, though. The thing we didn’t do (Thursday) was rebound them. We had two (offensive) rebounds at halftime. When we do that, we’re not going to win.”

Illinois wound up with eight total offensive rebounds by the end of Thursday’s game. That’s eight offensive rebounds on 38 total missed shots. An offensive rebounding percentage of 21.1 percent — far below the Illini’s season-long mark of 35.4 percent.

“Coach says all the time it doesn’t matter how many threes we shoot,” Illinois guard Dra Gibbs-Lawhorn said. “We’ve just got to get our offensive rebounds. Coach tells us he wants us to get up a lot of threes, whether they go in or whether they miss. As long as we’re on the offensive boards, that’s where we can make up for the misses. I don’t think we did that too well (Thursday).”

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/good-morning-illini-nation-three-154800777.html

Author : The News-Gazette, Champaign-Urbana, Ill.

Publish date : 2025-01-25 15:48:00

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