Show Me My Opponent, 2023-24: #20 Illinois

BIG NOON SATURDAY with about 80% fewer Wendy's ads

Happy Saturday, friends. Tennessee takes on Illinois, currently #20 in the journalism polls, for the first time since…1988! Really now. I honestly would’ve guessed a random link-up in the early 2000s, because things like a Tennessee-Louisville or Tennessee-Nebraska home-and-home actually happened when I was but a youth. Anyway, Tennessee gets this one in Knoxville, Illinois gets theirs in Champaign next winter. Fair and square, the way it oughta be.

I do find myself wishing this series had started last winter because it would have been a lot funnier of a game, though less fun as a neutral. By the end of the season it was comically easy to see that the Illinois players hated each other and genuinely did not enjoy wearing the same uniform as the person next to them. The players themselves would likely disagree publicly, but when your out-transfers go to schools like Georgetown, Louisville, and Georgia that spells it out pretty well for me.

This year’s Illinois looks the part of an improved, focused squad. They’re a better three-point jumper away from presumably a top-20 offense or thereabouts while retaining their standard very-good-not-elite defense. This year’s unit ranks #1 in 2PT% allowed (awesome!) while ranking 337th in TO% forced, which would merely be the fourth finish in the 300s in that stat over five seasons. It’s a very conservative style of ball, but it works because they force everyone to take about 40 midrange jumpers a game.

For both, this is a rare mid-December national showcase on a network everyone in America gets at a time where if you’re home you’ve probably got nothing better to do. Who could say no, other than people who like seeing balls go in baskets?

BELOW THE LINE ($): A timid promise that the ball will go in the basket

Illinois offense

So you got the 2023-24 chart above, but I think last year’s is fairly educational too. Here’s that one.

Last year’s Illini team was a remarkable experiment in how much bad one offense, and one man, was able to take. Brad Underwood eventually devolved to the point of farting into a microphone. The season ended with three straight losses, 7 in 11, and their 5-star point guard who quit the team in January tweeting out his next destination (6:51 PM ET) literally two minutes after their Round of 64 loss to Arkansas went final (6:49). Somehow I think I went a little light here.

The lone shining star that generated sustainable excitement was a transfer who nearly went to Michigan before becoming one of numerous would-be Wolverines waylaid by their admissions department. Terrance Shannon (21.6 PPG, 4 RPG) decided to return to Illinois instead of risk the NBA Draft (was projected around the 45-55 range). All he has done is ascend into the status of one of the ancient Gods Homer wrote about.

Shannon would be described by the kids these days as having “the juice” if any child actually says that in 2023. He is on fire from the entire floor right now. He’s at 45% on 53 threes. He’s shooting 63% on twos. No other player in America with >40 rim attempts and >40 three attempts is shooting >65% at the rim/>40% from three. The list is literally just this guy. He’s bonkers, which is why he sits #4 in KenPom’s Player of the Year Rankings at the time of publishing. And yes, this means Tennessee has now played four players in KenPom’s top 10 in the first five weeks of the season.

Shannon represents a unique problem. Illinois does a lot of one-on-one scoring, which is what Tennessee generally wants to force, but Shannon is their 6’6”, 225-pound point guard and main ball-handler. I don’t think you want Zakai Zeigler on him. (I’m assuming this is going to be mainly Jahmai Mashack and/or Santiago Vescovi’s work.) Illinois doesn’t really run a ton of on-ball screens, but the majority of the ones they do run are ones that Shannon uses. Once he uses the pick, you are forced into an immediate question:

• Do I play drop coverage and deal with the results of a likely jumper, where he’s shooting 45% from three?

• Do I overpursue and leave the lane open for a drive to the basket, where he’s shooting 71%?

• Do I commit to icing him and play 4-on-3, knowing that Shannon has created 12 open threes for others out of pick-and-rolls this season?

None of those answers are really exciting; he just has a lot of different ways of victimizing defenses. How Tennessee attempts to handle him is going to be really interesting. I was told this offseason that Tennessee knew they could get Brandon Miller (probably the most recent mental comparison most would make) in trouble by way of pushing into his traditional stepback dribble, but Shannon is a little different. I don’t envy the scout here.

The upshot here is that aside from literally one game - the most recent one, of course - this has pretty much just been a Shannon production. Marcus Domask (12.1 PPG, 5.3 RPG) is the other guy you’ve heard of because he just lit FAU on fire in a way very few have done, but aside from their home loss to Marquette Domask really hasn’t popped in orange. Remove the FAU game (13-15 2PT, 2-6 3PT) and this is a guy averaging 9.1 PPG on 50% 2PT/24% 3PT shooting splits. I think that he’s a good player! Don’t get me wrong. He’s just unlikely to drop that FAU performance twice in a row.

Domask shares ball-handling duties with Shannon and is weirdly way more comfortable as a pull-up shooter than a spot-up guy. The four times I’ve watched Illinois play I’ve mostly come away alarmed by Domask’s shot selection than I have encouraged. He doesn’t have a runner/floater, really, and he rarely takes a midrange two. Those things are good. But a lot of the time he just defaults to driving to the rim and seeing what happens, which would be fine if he were a good finisher. He is not. This one is a total biff against Valpo of all teams, which would be okay if I didn’t see this exact miss against Rutgers two weeks later.

I appreciate any guard that wants to attack the rim but you’ve gotta have a plan. Domask often doesn’t seem to other than hoping to draw a foul. Until he figures that out this offense might be limited.

Aside from center Dain Dainja (8.8 PPG, 4.6 RPG), an all-time great name, everyone else here is mostly spare parts. Dainja gets the typical center’s diet of post-ups, offensive rebounds, and basket cuts. He is also shooting 27% (yes) from the free throw line this year and is at 49.6% for his career (64.1% career on twos), which is 1) why I say hack away and 2) probably why he’s played a combined 23 minutes against their three good opponents despite not being in foul trouble.

Everyone else is a role player or anonymous. Luke Goode is a terrific deep shooter with a career 42% hit rate but has attempted nearly 80% of his career shots from deep and is the worst defender in the rotation. Ty Rodgers is a weird 6’6” guy that plays all of 1-3 but analytically computes as a 4/5 because he’s 0-1 from three in his college career. He can handle the ball somewhat but mostly hangs in the paint waiting for dropoffs. Quincy Guerrier and Coleman Hawkins are the main non-Dainja bigs in the rotation. Hawkins you may remember from at one point being an All-Big Ten level player, but his efficiency and value has cratered from 2022 to now. Guerrier is 2-20 from three (31% career) and does not grade out as a real positive on offense. Justin Harmon (mostly a shooter/driver), Dra Gibbs-Lawhorn (freshman, struggling), and Armani Hansberry (freshman, thriving defensively) fill out the rotation.

That previous paragraph is too long so here’s your summary: this is an Illinois offense with one all-world player, an occasionally special but mostly fine player, and little else. They score very well at the rim and not well anywhere else. If that all-world player (or the other main) isn’t all-worlding their hope probably lies in the role player collective popping off out of nowhere, which, not really a thing coaches like to count on.

CHART!

Illinois defense

This is pretty saucy as usual. Brad Underwood cut his teeth defensively at Stephen F. Austin with the style everyone associates SFA with: a hyper-aggressive full-court press that forces billions of turnovers and commits billions of fouls. He ran it for two years at Illinois, decided it couldn’t work in the Big Ten, then completely overhauled his defense into a very conservative unit that will let you shoot anything you want from 7-20 feet as long as it isn’t a layup or a three. Hard to argue with these results:

That 11th-ranked defense is the one you’ll see today. Illinois sits at the #3 eFG% allowed nationally and the #1 2PT%, which are made much more remarkable by not really having a singularly elite rim protector or protectors. Dainja sits at a 5.2% Block%, which sits 15th-best among Big Ten centers in a conference with (for now) 14 teams. What gives?

Well, it’s a unit that knows what it wants: drop coverage, every single time. The right teams can exploit this quite well, but there aren’t always a lot of right teams on the schedule. A good example would be 2020-21, when Illinois got away with having the lumbering Kofi Cockburn at center all year long until a heavy P&R system in Loyola Chicago had the guards to exploit it. Tennessee has the guards…depending on the day. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.

More to the point, Illinois plays way off the ball and is pretty comfy with it. The Illini sit 9th nationally in possessions classified as P&R Ball Handler on Synergy, which is a very easy way of finding out what teams run the highest percentage of drop coverage. For the criticisms one could have about Illinois, one would not be that their bigs get in a lot of foul trouble; no rotational big is above 3.9 fouls/40. It’s because they have a lot of possessions that look exactly like this.

As of the time of writing, only Creighton and BYU (tied with Dayton) force more non-rim twos than the Illini. If you’re of a certain age - perhaps one who watched Tennessee play basketball from November 2019 through March 2021 - this may make you a little sick. But! The right team can beat this scheme, and while we’re well aware of the things Illinois rocks at (the above, plus isolation defense), we don’t have a ton of data on how they fare against motion-heavy offenses like Tennessee’s.

The closest correlation one could possibly draw in the Big Ten is maybe Iowa, who runs a bunch of off-ball screens and flex cuts and is similarly white. The last data point is barely useful - Iowa won last season 81-79 - but it did offer an interesting preview. For one, it was Illinois’ third-worst defensive performance of the season on a day where Iowa shot just okay from the field. For another, it was the third-worst day of the entire season in terms of points allowed on the P&R Ball Handler play type.

Iowa’s offensive interest is mostly in 1) moving the ball well; 2) having a guy between 6’4” and 6’8” that can go and get buckets; 3) not turning the ball over; 4) getting to the paint with high frequency. Iowa had one huge advantage that day: they had Tony Perkins, a 6’4” guard who loved attacking from all three levels, and Illinois did not.

That, perhaps more than anything, could be Tennessee’s lane. Dalton Knecht, call your shot, brother. (Also consider testing these posts because I’m not 100% convinced they’re elite defenders. No post keeps a foul rate that low all year, right?)

How Tennessee matches up

On one hand it’s Saturday morning and I’m tempted to just put Tennessee’s home record under Rick Barnes as a 5+ point favorite from 2018 to present, which is 66-7. Against non-conference foes, it’s an even nastier 36-1 while going 23-13-1 ATS. The one loss during the entire run was a 51-47 home loss to Memphis during the worst Tennessee basketball season of the last eight years. Thompson-Boling Arena, in short, is a bad place to play if you’re not Tennessee.

Mostly I think this might be a game where both teams kind of match each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Tennessee is probably okay leaning into the shot selection Illinois produces defensively. Illinois is probably happy to take a ton of pull-up jumpers like the ones Tennessee forces every night. Both want to test the concept that neither allows a lot of open threes. Both also know they’ve gotta score down low at some point and are probably comfortable with missing some layups because they know they can rebound.

I think Tennessee has a real area of opportunity here in using those off-ball screens, along with dribble hand-offs, to free their guards and wings up to get some buckets. Obviously we’re leaning towards Dalton Knecht being The Guy here; he’ll need to have a big game for Tennessee to come out on top.

The early tell in this game is a weird one, but hear me out: if Tennessee gets off multiple catch-and-shoot threes early, you should feel happy even if they don’t immediately go in. Illinois allows the fifth-lowest C&S attempt rate in the nation because their defense is entirely built around running shooters off the three-point line. If Tennessee’s still able to get those attempts off, that’s a good sign to me, because it indicates the shooter felt he had enough time and space to shoot it.

Defensively, Tennessee has to make peace with the fact that Terrence Shannon is probably going to score 20 points. The key is making sure it takes Shannon a long, long time to get there. What I’d guess Tennessee’s strategy is is this: as long as the ball is not in Terrence Shannon’s hands, we can deal with the results. That’s going to mean a lot of icing and hard-hedging of ball-screens to force a pass. I would not describe much of anyone on this Illinois roster minus Domask as even an above-average passer, so I think you live with whatever comes of the double team.

We know that Shannon can shoot it from all over the court; we know he’s a tremendous threat inside the perimeter. What we don’t know is that, outside of 1.5 games, if he has any help. Domask is a solid player who’s largely struggled to adjust to the Illinois roster, conveniently outside of the one game he’s played against a high-end mid-major with mid-major talent. Tennessee is…not that.

It’s also a team that seems to take a lot of panicky shots and has a horrific turnover margin, neither of which are positives when Tennessee is your opponent. There’s a path to this being an ugly game that still results in a 6-point win for Tennessee; there’s also a path to this being a tremendous game that results in a 6-point win for Tennessee. Both teams have a few different paths to take here, but it’s Tennessee’s supporting cast that I trust a bit more, particularly on defense.

Expected starters + rotations

Via KenPom.

Illinois

Tennessee

Key matchups

Terrence Shannon vs. Jahmai Mashack. I mean, technically, it’s Zakai Zeigler who will be point guard. But Zakai Zeigler is not going to draw Terrence Shannon, and it’s probably not a good game for Zakai in general. Mashack is the best defender on an elite defense and should draw the main assignment.

Marcus Domask vs. Dalton Knecht. Not because they’re both pasty whites! Promise! This is just the natural SF vs. SF matchup. Domask has had serious struggles shooting it from three and is just okay defensively; this feels like unless Domask somehow repeats FAU Knecht could have a huge edge.

Ty Rodgers vs. Santiago Vescovi. Scrapping for a third Illinois Guy is not easy, so this is just the third-highest guy in minutes. Rodgers is a weird matchup in that he’s a 6’6” shooting guard who categorically refuses to take a jumper. He has not taken a single one all season. This is a yes/no rubric: did you prevent him from getting to the rim? If so, you won.

Three things to watch for

Our old friend shooting variance. Friends of the Substack ShotQuality have Illinois primed for massive regression on threes (3%) and midrange jumpers (10%!). Tennessee has deserved better results from three thus far…but so has Illinois. Is this the day one, both, or neither regress to the mean with a 40%+ performance?

How bad the turnover margin gets. I mean, this is an Illinois team averaging a -4.7 turnover margin per 100 taking on a Tennessee team averaging +5.1 per 100. That comes out to an expected +7 in TOs for UT, which would be problematic for an Illinois program who’s 5-6 against top 100 teams since 2021 when losing the turnover battle by 6 or more.

Free throw defense. Only partially joking. This is #17 (Tennessee) against #24 (Illinois) in terms of opponent FT%. Tennessee is the far better free throw shooting team in general, which could prove to be huge in a tight game.

The laws of journalism compel me to say

That this is a game Tennessee usually wins. They’re facing a very good Illinois team that has 1.5 plus offensive players on it. For better or worse, I’d argue Tennessee has the superior offense. They likely have the better defense, though not by much. They’re at home, where they have very rarely lost to non-SEC opponents since Barnes got the program rolling again. The main Illinois path to victory is Shannon going bonkers and getting a second plus performance from Domask or Dainja; it’s a thinner path than the ones I can envision for Tennessee.

Three predictions

1. Tennessee wins the turnover battle by 6 or more;

2. Another innocent person’s eardrums are victimized by the villain that is Sterl the Pearl’s mic;

3. Tennessee 75, Illinois 68.