Illini Scoring Woes

The Illini scoring woes continued today, and were not limited to embarrassingly poor free throw shooting. Shaun Pruitt needs to be sitting on the bench during the last 10 minutes of any close game, period. And he needs to be working on European geography and languages for his professional career starting next year.

The three guard and four guard line-up needs to go, and be brought back in 2008 or 2009. Why? Deron Williams, Luther Head and Dee Brown have left campus for quite some time, and their replacements are not anywhere close to being as efficient as they were. To demonstrate my point, I put together some season to date statistics on the top 10 Illini players, to show how much each scores per 40 minutes, and ranked them accordingly.

Shaun Pruitt 19.9 ppg
Brian Randle 18.1 ppg
Mike Tisdale 16.5 ppg
Trent Meacham 15.7 ppg
Rodney Alexander 15.3 ppg
Bill Cole 15.3 ppg
Calvin Brock 13.1 ppg
Mike Davis 11.8 ppg
Demetri McCamey 9.6 ppg
Chester Frazier 6.3 ppg

We need to play one point guard, not two point guards this year, since neither one has good scoring capability. I realize we can't play both centers all the time, but we need to put some emphasis on having guys on the floor that can put the ball in the cylinder.