When the basketball season began there was an air of uncertainty about Illinois, described as a work in progress.
Seniors Dee Brown and James Augustine were the only returning starters, and five of the top seven players from the team that finished second in the NCAA tournament were gone.
Halfway through the Big Ten Conference season there’s reason to wonder if the work in progress will turn out to be a masterpiece.
“We can be a great team,” Brown said after Tuesday night’s victory at Wisconsin. “We have all the ingredients.”
The Illini (20-2, 6-2 Big Ten) go into Saturday night’s home game with Penn State (10-9, 2-6) as the nation’s sixth-ranked team.
They don’t compare to last season’s team, which spent most of the season ranked No. 1 and wound up with a 37-2 record.
But the records of both the 2003-04 and 2002-03 teams suffer when compared with the current reconstructed team’s composite at the same stage of the season.
The five starters on last season’s team–Brown, Augustine, Deron Williams, Luther Head and Roger Powell–also were beginning their third seasons as starters. They played in 2002-03 for Bill Self, then for his successor, Bruce Weber.
After 22 games Self’s last team was 15-7 and Weber’s first team was 17-5.
In those five losses two seasons ago the Illini were blown out by 19 by Providence in Madison Square Garden, were defeated by seven by North Carolina in Greensboro, lost by four to Purdue at home, lost by 10 at Northwestern and were routed by 20 at Wisconsin.
The current Illini have had only one bad performance, their 63-48 loss at Iowa. In their 62-60 loss at Indiana, they played well at the start and came on strong down the stretch.
“A lot of people think this is Weber’s best coaching job,” said Stephen Bardo, the Illinois radio network analyst and a former Illini guard.
“They don’t have a guy they can give the ball to when the shot clock is running down and say: `Go get us a bucket’ or `Go get us to the free-throw line.’ They hang their hat on the defensive end and they’ve figured out their roles. They allow [Brown] and [Augustine] to lead.”
The Illini have given up more than 65 points only once this season (Michigan’s 74), and no opponent has shot better than 50 percent against them. In Big Ten play they are the leaders in scoring defense (57.2 ppg) and field-goal-percentage defense (.380).
The loss to Purdue on Jan. 10, 2004, is the only home loss in the collegiate careers of Augustine and Brown, and the Illini’s 33-game winning streak in Assembly Hall ties them with Gonzaga for the longest home streak in the nation.
“To lose on the road is a bad feeling; to lose at home is 10 times worse,” Augustine said. “That’s the attitude Dee and I take to every game, and the young guys have done a great job of understanding it.
“Our team is very good, but we don’t have the talent we had. We’ve come together as a team. Defense is winning us games. On offense, guys are stepping up when we need them.”
Augustine was asked why the record of the 2003-04 team, which had the same talent pool as last season’s, wasn’t as good after 22 games as this supposedly less-talented team’s.
“We didn’t buy into the [Weber] system right away,” he said. “We were doing our own thing. Our sophomore year was tough. When I think back on it, learning from those losses is one of the things that has made us as good as we are.
“This year we have older guys who said: `Hey, the system works,’ and the younger guys bought into it right away.
“Coach Weber is a great coach. He teaches us what we should do to win.”
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nmilbert@tribune.com
