Coaches Gene Keady of Purdue and Jimmy Collins of Illinois-Chicago learned some very important things about their basketball teams Monday night when the Boilermakers easily beat the Flames 77-61 in a Preseason NIT opening-round game.
Keady and Boilermaker fans were elated to see that junior sharpshooter Jaraan Cornell, scoring points in explosive bursts, apparently has made a full recovery from the broken ankle that shelved him and weakened the Boilermakers’ Big Ten title hopes last February.
And Collins, who coached the Flames to the school’s first NCAA tournament just eight months ago, looked at his new team and noted which players showed fear and which did not when they opened their season on the road before a noisy, partisan capacity crowd of 14,123 fans.
Cornell was averaging 14 points a game and knocking down three-point baskets at a 52 percent rate last season when he broke his ankle. Without his long-range scoring, the Purdue offense wasn’t capable of preventing Michigan State from winning the league championship.
Monday night, Cornell hit 7 of 9 shots from two-point range, 2 of 5 from three-point range and scored a team-high 23 points. In the first half he went on a tear, scoring 10 points in just 2:35 to build Purdue’s lead to a comfortable 34-11.
UIC trailed 50-24 at the half but, ignited by back-to-back baskets by Jordan Kardos, scored the first 11 points of the second half. Cornell then drilled three baskets in a row, the third one for three points, to spark an offsetting 11-0 run that re-established the halftime spread.
“We have to have that from Cornell,” Keady said. “We’re tickled that his ankle is better. Of course, he has to play defense too. His man (24-point scorer Bryant Notree) scored about 10 in one stretch too.”
“I feel good,” said Cornell, who hit the deck hard twice when he scored on driving layups. “I try not even to think about my ankle.”
Collins called the defeat “a good lesson. We’ve got quite a few games on the road early in the season, so this was a chance to play before a large, hostile crowd. There were some positives. If we had just played the second half, we would have won by 10.”
Collins went with two new starters in the second half–Leonard Walker and Kardos for Tarrie Monroe and Cory Little.
“I looked in their eyes and saw that some of them were not afraid,” said Collins. “Kardos (who made seven baskets) was not afraid. The youngster Steve Farmer wasn’t afraid either. Or T.J. Wilson or that young man from St. Louis, Jon-Pierre Mitchom.”
On the other hand, Collins said Monroe, a junior college player with more experience than the four he had complimented, “melted down” and was afraid.
UIC never had a chance. Two 6-foot-8-inch musclemen, Greg McQuay (7) and Brian Cardinal (5), scored Purdue’s first 12 points, and the Boilermakers zipped to a 23-7 cushion after 10 minutes.
“We were bigger than they were,” McQuay said. “It was our plan to go inside.”
Keady did not like his team’s performance in the second half, and he disliked its foul shooting all night long. Purdue hit only 13 of 33 free throws, a sickly .455 percentage.
