With talented sophomore guard Deron Williams playing the role of silent cheerleader with a fractured jaw, Illinois coach Bruce Weber and Memphis coach John Calipari were worried men going into Saturday night’s game at the Assembly Hall.
“We have to find some scoring from somebody and have the crowd carry us emotionally,” Weber had said before the game.
“What I feared would happen happened,” Calipari said afterward. “When Deron goes down, you know everybody is saying `Someone has got to step up,’ and you know you’ll get hurt by somebody you have no idea will hurt you. That kid’s name was Richard McBride. He makes one shot all year and tonight he gets 22 points.”
With a sellout crowd of 16,618 doing some heavy emotional lifting, the freshman guard who began the night with a 0.7 points-per-game average came off the bench to deliver clutch baskets and lead the Illini from a 10-point first-half deficit to a 74-64 victory.
McBride’s contributions went beyond a shooting spree in which he hit six of his 10 shots from behind the three-point arc.
“Five assists, five rebounds and no turnovers for a freshman against a team that presses all night long–that’s as impressive as his 22 points,” said center Nick Smith.Memphis (4-2) was Illinois’ toughest home opponent during the non-conference segment of the season, which made it an especially important game for Weber, who was getting flak after Tuesday night’s humiliating 70-51 loss to Providence.
“I came to practice wearing a black suit and a black tie and I told the players [former coach] Bill Self is dead,” said Weber, who said he was “fed up” with the speculation the Illini would be a better team if Self had stayed instead of leaving Champaign to take the Kansas job last spring. Weber pointed out that Self’s teams had been badly beaten on several occasions.
Early on, it appeared that the Illini (6-2) were going to put on an Assembly Hall re-enactment of the Providence debacle. They seemed lost without Williams, who had surgery Friday to repair the two fractures in his jaw sustained Thursday against Maryland-Eastern Shore.
While Williams watched from the bench, the offense sputtered and Memphis capitalized on the Illini’s mistakes and poor shooting to take a 19-9 lead. During this dismal segment Illinois missed 12-of-15 shots and turned the ball over seven times.
But then the Illini scored 14 unanswered points and took the lead on McBride’s fastbreak layup.
Early in the second half, the Illini fell two points behind before McBride led a 20-3 run by hitting three shots from three-point territory. Memphis, which went into the game as the nation’s third best three-point shooting team, was unable to rally.
“They came together and played a great game without Deron,” said Calipari. “Dee Brown (who moved from shooting guard to replace Williams in running the offense at point guard) did his thing. He didn’t make a lot of shots (2-of-11) but he hurt us in a ton of other ways. The kid gets seven rebounds and seven assists and he hurt us defensively with great rotation.”
