Illinois 66, Michigan 51

A great win for the Illini, who move to 15-2 overall and 3-1 in the Big Ten. They needed to defend home court against a good Michigan team, especially with a tough game against Michigan State on Saturday, and they did just that. I didn't get to watch the game, since I don't have the Big Ten Network, so I don't know how the team looked. Looking at the box score, the keys to the game were Illinois outshooting Michigan (54.4 eFG% vs. 38.1 eFG%) and getting to the foul line more often (22 free throw attempts). This was the reverse of the previous game against Michigan (a 74-64 loss) where Michigan outshot Illinois 59.4 to 50.0 and Illinois barely got to the foul line at all.

Below is a plus-minus chart for the Illini in last night's game. These numbers are hard to find for college basketball and thus I have had to manually calculate them from the play-by-play data. For those unfamiliar with plus-minus, it measures how well the team does when a given player is on the court. For example, in last night's game, Illinois outscored Michigan by 8 points in the 25 minutes that Mike Davis was on the court.

Player	P/M	Minutes
Demetri McCamey	+3	33
Trent Meacham	+11	34
Chester Frazier	+12	34
Mike Davis	+8	25
Mike Tisdale	+15	34
Calvin Brock	+7	19
Dominique Keller	+0	4
Jeff Jordan	+11	10
Alex Legion	+5	7

Not surprisingly, the team was +15 with Mike Tisdale on the court as he posted 24 points on 10-12 shooting. Tisdale and McCamey were 16-21 from the field, while the rest of the team was 6-27. That said, McCamey was only +3 in his 33 minutes, meaning the team played significantly better without him on the floor. This is largely because McCamey came out of the game in the 2nd half with Illinois leading 52-45, at which point they promptly went on an 8-0 run to take a 60-45 lead. Jeff Jordan subbed in for McCamey during this 8-0 run, meaning Illinois was an excellent +11 when Jordan was on the court, despite the fact that he only played 10 minutes.

Especially in an individual game, plus-minus numbers must be taken with a grain of salt. We can't necessarily give all the credit to Jordan for the 8-0 run. Over the course of the season, however, statistical flukes should even out and there should be a clearer trend as to which players are contributing the most to the team's success. Thus I will provide numbers from conference play in another post.