Picture this: Your team is returning most of its starters from a squad that won a share of the Big Ten title last season, everybody is expecting you to repeat as champions, and one of the league’s best players is on your team.
Sound familiar?
No, this isn’t last year’s Northwestern football team, which dwindled out of postseason contention and the Big Ten race. Rather, it’s the story of the 2001-02 Illinois men’s basketball team.
Last year the Fighting Illini finished 13-3 in the league, won a share of the regular-season Big Ten crown and made it to the Elite Eight. But this season has not been so kind to Illinois, which many picked to win the conference outright.
The Fighting Illini are currently 4-5 in conference play and have yet to win a league game on the road. They’ve lost three straight contests and are now tied for sixth in the Big Ten.
Ranked No. 3 in the preseason, Illinois, currently at No. 21, might be considered lucky to still be in the Top 25.
“The players are frustrated and coaches are frustrated,” Illinois head coach Bill Self said. “We didn’t intend for it to be like this. The key before you can talk about X’s and O’s is to get the guys to play as hard and as unselfish as they can. Those are monumental in my mind.
“The frustrating thing to me is that we haven’t even come close to doing any of those.”
Self said he has not been pleased with last year’s Big Ten Player of the Year, 6-foot-3 guard Frank Williams. Although Williams is fourth in the conference in scoring with 16.9 points per game, Self said the junior is not playing with the “passion and energy” that the Illini need.
“I don’t think he’s playing with much emotion,” Self said, “and I think that affects performance.”
To compound its downward spiral, Illinois guard Damir Krupalija aggravated a stress fracture in his foot during the Illini’s loss to Michigan State on Feb. 3. He will have surgery today and may not return until the conference tournament.
Krupalija, a senior, is second on the team in rebounding with 5.5 a game and fifth in scoring with 7.5 points a contest.
PRIDE OF DULUTH: The last time a freshman won Big Ten Player of the Week honors, Minnesota guard Rick Rickert was still showing off on a junior high basketball court.
Rickert is still impressing people on the hardwood, but this time it’s on the bigger stage of Division I-A college basketball.
The freshman from Duluth, Minn., was named the conference’s player of the week on Monday, making him the first freshman to accomplish the feat since Iowa’s Luke Recker did it with Indiana in 1998.
Rickert, a forward, averaged 26.5 points a game on 60 percent shooting last week. He led the Golden Gophers to wins over Penn State and Indiana, which was tied with Ohio State atop the league standings at the time.
Rickert leads Minnesota with 14.1 points per game and has been instrumental to the Golden Gophers’ 6-3 conference record, which puts them in third place.
“We all knew he was going to be a very good player in this league,” Minnesota head coach Dan Monson said. “You just don’t know when. Fortunately, it seems to be happening now.”
RUDE RECEPTION: It was not a warm homecoming for Recker as he returned Tuesday night to Indiana for the first time since transferring to Iowa in December 1999.
The Hoosiers (15-7, 8-2 Big Ten) held Recker to just eight points as they handed the Hawkeyes (15-9, 4-6) their worst loss of the season, 79-51, at Assembly Hall in Bloomington, Ind.
Recker shot just 3-for-10 and was booed every time he touched the ball.
Iowa head coach Steve Alford, who as a player led Indiana to the 1987 national championship, is now 0-2 in Bloomington as the Hawkeyes’ coach.
