How Mizzou were unable to overcome their rebounding disadvantage against Illinois

Dec 23, 2024 | Uncategorized

Written By

Cal Tobias/Rock M Nation

With a rebounding disadvantage imminent, the Tigers needed to make up for it with points off of turnovers and free throws against Illinois.

The Illinois Fighting Illini came into their Braggin Rights’ showdown with the Missouri Tigers ranked ninth in the country in rebounding margin, while their adversaries came into the game ranking 173rd. At this stage of the season, teams have done a pretty good job figuring out what they excel in and it was pretty clear that Illinois was going to succeed in rebounding and thus have an advantage in second chance points.

While being dominated in second chance points isn’t a recipe for success, the Missouri Tigers had two avenues to swing the tide in their favor: free throws and points off of turnovers. Unfortunately for head coach Dennis Gates’ squad, they were unable to pick up a decisive enough advantage in those categories to pull out a win, as they lost 80-77 and had their 10-game win streak snapped.

Let’s look at the first factor, free throws. The Tigers were able to flat out dominate in picking up free throw attempts as they have many a times this season, with 37 attempts to the Fighting Illini’s 23. Efficiency is what let the Tigers down, however, as they were 76% from the charity stripe. This led to the discrepancy in free throws made being much less than the attempt-margin, with the Illini making 22 free throws and the Tigers making 28.

Mark Mitchell’s aggressive drive to the hoop is a great example of how the Tigers are able to succeed at picking up free throws so well. He drives to the hoop, attacks the basket, and throughout that entire motion maintained control in the air to get the shot and the foul. Mitchell has been able to create plays like this all season, and it’s why the Tigers are so good at getting free throw attempts.

The free throw generation from Mitchell is great, though he still has flaws. While Mitchell has had phenomenal games throughout this seaso, if he could slightly augment his free throw efficiency from its current 58%, he would be one of the most lethal players in the conference. In this game, Mitchell accounted for six of the Tigers’ nine misses at the line and misses like that can be extremely costly in a three-point loss. Especially when the opposition is 22-23 from the line themselves with the only miss coming on their final foul shot of the game.

“We have got to get better at the line,” Gates said post-game. “We needed to hold leads more often to stress Illinois out more.”

Another area where Mizzou was unable to swing the curve was points off of turnovers, as the Tigers only led 12-11 over Illinois in that category despite generating eight more turnovers. Illinois picked up 1.22 points per turnover forced while the Tigers had just 0.71. By comparison, against kansas the Tigers had 1.05 points per turnover while the jayhawks had 0.91.

This play that essentially began the game was something the Tigers needed to produce throughout the night, but were just unable to. Credit to Illinois’ guards; they adjusted accordingly and limited their costly turnovers. There was a noticing lack of turnovers that led to favorable odd-man situations for the Tigers after this play, and it caused the Tigers to work just hard enough for their buckets to make a difference.

Points off turnovers and second chance points combined is a good stat to indicate which team is capitalizing off of the oppositions mistakes more, and the Fighting Illini held a slight lead of 24-20 in that category. If it feels like I am a broken record saying this it’s because it’s important, but the reality is a four-point difference in any category is anything but inconsequential when the game came down to the final possession.

The reality is that this was always going to be a close game because of how vastly different these teams styles were, but the Fighting Illini’s ability to not let the Tigers beat them badly in the areas they were expected to is the largest factor contributing to this result. Missouri needed to overcome their rebounding disadvantage by playing to their strengths and they didn’t do it well enough to secure victory. On the bright side, there is plenty of learning material from this game for the Tigers as they will close out the non-conference slate with Alabama State on December 30.

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