There’s no such thing as a good defeat, Illinois coach Bill Self said.
But Self said the Memphis Tigers taught his young players a hard lesson Saturday at the Pyramid, one he hopes will give them strength and wisdom in January, February and March.
“They’re down, but they’re supposed to be down,” Self said after the Tigers (6-2) slammed the door on Illinois’ eight-game winning streak with a 77-74 victory. “I told them, `I hate to tell you this, but we weren’t going to run the table.’ This may be the best thing for them. If this makes us better for conference play, we’ll be glad it happened.”
What happened is that the seventh-ranked Illini (8-1) tasted what life will really be like on the road.
“We made too many mistakes,” said freshman guard Deron Williams. “We lost our composure.”
A fired-up Memphis team that welcomed back two of its best players–Chris Massie and Jeremy Hunt–had an awful lot to do with that.
Massie, a senior forward who missed the first seven games because of poor grades and a two-game suspension for playing in the NBA predraft camp, had 13 points and 12 rebounds in his season debut. Hunt, a freshman guard, added 11 points, including three clutch three-pointers, in his first action since breaking his foot in the season opener.
“You finally got a chance to see our full team, a team I told you I liked,” said Memphis coach John Calipari.
There were some bright spots. Brian Cook played a terrific second half to wind up with 21 points and nine rebounds. Dee Brown had 19 points. And the Illini never gave up.
But they couldn’t recover from early foul trouble and poor three-point shooting. Two fouls in the first 2:47 sent Cook to the bench for 6 1/2 minutes. Illinois regained the lead 18-17 shortly after he returned, but even with the 6-foot-9-inch, 253-pound Massie also in foul trouble, the Illini weren’t able to capitalize.
“Two fouls that early kind of takes me out of the game,” said Cook, who scored 15 of his 21 in the second half. “I’ve got to be a little smarter than I was.”
Illinois still led at the half 37-31.
That advantage quickly evaporated when Memphis opened the second half with a 13-3 run, regaining the lead 44-40.
“I thought we lost the game in the first five minutes of the second half,” Self said. “We were not as intense as we should be.”
Cook said he detected that during the break.
“I thought we were a little too loose in the locker room,” he said. “I think we thought we had control. Then when we fell behind it got tough.”
With Cook in foul trouble the Illini were 11-for-31 from behind the arc. The result was their worst shooting percentage of the season at 39 percent.
Nonetheless, when Cook hit a three-pointer from the top of the key, the game was tied 71-71 with 1:36 left, and a three-pointer by Brown cut the deficit to 76-74 with 9.3 seconds to go.
But Williams fouled Billy Richmond with 8.6 seconds left and Richmond made 1-of-2 free throws for the final margin. Brown’s last-second heave never had a chance.
“It wasn’t like we lost to a bad team,” Self said. “We lost to an NCAA tournament team. This was a reality check for them. They found out it’s easier to play when you’re up 15 with five minutes to play–and today we weren’t. We needed this game. We needed to win it, but we knew back in November this would be our toughest preseason game. And it was.”
