A college basketball game like this, the one in which the Purdue Boilermakers absolutely took over the Illini in the second half, as their seniors played like seniors: guys who learn, develop and focus on progress. On the other side, the Illinois seniors regressed to historically epic proportions.
But enough on that for now, believe me we’ll have plenty on all that later.
For now, I encourage you to check out the work of Travis Miller, from Hammer and Rails.com
It’s the SB Nation Purdue site, and a “friend of the program” here at TSB.
This year we have new demons that have been a little harder to slay. We hadn’t beaten a top 50 team on the road (though Valparaiso moved to 49 in the latest RPI), and we hadn’t won a game after trailing at halftime. That said, we can warm up the treadmill again.
This game was a sweet, sweet win where Purdue took control and owned the second half like they did for much of last year. For the first time we displayed a killer instinct we have been lacking. That culminated in E`Twaun Moore turning into The Assassin we have needed him to be. With 1:02 left and the Fighting Illini desperate for a stop down six, Moore worked the clock down and absolutely buried an 18-footer that was so demoralizing for the home crowd all you could hear in the arena was the ball going through the net.
People started gathering their coats and heading for the exits at that point.
Negatives from the first Illinois game
Bruce Weber – I think he really botched this game. Brandon Paul was working early, but he only went to Tisdale on the low block once. It resulted in a basket and a foul very late, but you would think he would have tried this earlier when it was obvious we weren’t going to play Patrick Bade and Sandi Marcius anymore.
Demetri McCamey – Did he play today? I’m not sure.
The Orange Krush – Taunting Robbie Hummel is weak sauce. So is sitting down at timeouts.
Go here to read the entire piece, it’s really good.
Back to McCamey, he’s now essentially the Enron of NBA Draft stock. Or if you’d prefer a more recent reference, the Lehmann Brothers of NBA draft stock. But there were a ton of other people bashing Meechi in the twitterverse today. Here are some of the better tweets: