Illinois didn’t get beat against Northwestern. It lost.

Happy Thursday, Illinois Land!

Brad Underwood and Illinois basketball made it two losses in a row at Northwestern.

This game possessed several iterations as it progressed. Initially, it was a black-and-blue slug fest with the officials refusing to call anything but blatantly obvious fouls. Neither team reached the bonus in the first half.

Here’s Ethan Holesha with the recap of the specifics of the overtime loss.

Not fun to watch. Not easy to watch. A classic Big Ten game, in a bad way.

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After halftime, the shot-making of both teams (particularly Northwestern) rivaled a medium-level NBA contest. It was aesthetically pleasing. In many ways, this was the most entertaining Big Ten contest of the season.

Illinois had a chance to win outright in regulation, with Marcus Domask missing a twisting fadeaway from 14 feet with about four seconds left. More on this later.

The shots falling could be attributed to offensive prowess just as much, if not more, than lack of defensive gameplan or execution of said plan.

Having said that, Underwood made few adjustments to the decisions on how they were going to guard ball screens.

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For most of the game, Illinois played ball screens in drop coverage (man guarding the screener drops into the middle of the lane and stays even or better with the screener) to force Northwestern and point guard Boo Buie into tough, contested floaters and runners.

The loss this season, in some ways, is worse than the previous defeat in Evanston.

I’ll give you a few reasons below.

Illinois showed a lack of ability to make easy shots at the rim, and the defensive gameplan in the second half was suspect. Shannon guarding Buie at the end of regulation was perplexing at the time, and even more so the next day.

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• Championship aspirations: Illinois had legitimate thoughts on a regular season Big Ten title, despite a putrid home loss to hapless Maryland. The team sits at 5-3 in conference play, a full two games back of Wisconsin and 1.5 games back of Purdue. Wisconsin does not come to Champaign this year.
• Full strength: Terrence Shannon, Jr. played in this game. Without the All-American, key Illinois players were forced to play 35+ minutes. The same situation…