What Illinois coach Brad Underwood said after the 66-64 loss to No. 1 Tennessee at the buzzer

What Illinois coach Brad Underwood said after his team’s 66-64 loss to No. 1 Tennessee at the buzzer Saturday at State Farm Center in Champaign:

Opening Statement

“Really high-level basketball game. They’re number one for a reason, and they’re (good). I think we stressed them. They stressed us. We got better today, even though they had two more points than us. Give them credit. They had the ball last and made the play. So much respect for Rick (Barnes), the job he’s done. Everywhere he’s been along the way, they’ve always been a winner, and you know what you’re getting. That made our team better today.

“The game was a rock fight. I don’t know if any two teams could literally shoot it any worse in the first half. I thought that we were fortunate to be in that position at half, with Tomi playing eight or nine minutes, Bam out of the game. You know, (Chaz) Lanier got going in the first half, but 17 points on 17 shots, I’ll take that most every single night. But then I thought the couple of deciding things, thought (Igor) Milicic on the glass was really big. We let (Jordan) Gainey get going. We had a six-point lead in a stretch where we didn’t guard … what’s No. 8’s name (Darlinstone Dubar)? Anyway, he hits a three, and then we lose Gainey right off a little floppy action, and he hits a three, and we let him get his head up and get going.

“But (I) wish I had the last five seconds over. I would have called timeout. And give Gainey credit. He made a heck of a play. But that’s where this team has to continue to grow — and I’ve got to help them grow — with communication. Ran a bad side out-of-bounds play, the one we always run. Didn’t execute it. And you do those in the last couple minutes, you’re gonna lose to No. 1, and we did today.”

If he was close to taking a timeout after the made free throw with 5.7 seconds left, before Tennessee’s inbound 

“I think it’s just common sense that you want to call a timeout after a free throw so you can get your defense set. We always push like we did at the end of regulation to get there. Anytime there’s 10 seconds or under, we actually practice this, we push. K.J. got fouled. So then they just flipped it. I should have called the timeout. Point blank. I should have called the timeout after K.J. made the free throw, game tied, got our defense set. We weren’t quite where we needed to be. And five seconds is a long time in a game. He made the play.”

If the mistakes Illinois made were a product of so many new players still learning to play together

“That doesn’t matter. It’s that’s on me. That’s me. We’ve got to do a better job. We try to work on situations daily. It’s hard to work on all of ’em. I thought we, you know, we handled the other side of it pretty well, with K.J., with Bam. We talked about getting it in the paint, getting fouled. They did that part of it beautifully.

“I never want to call a timeout on offense in that situation, because I don’t want to face a set defense or a changing defense. That’s not ever worked great. But again, you’ve got to … you’ve got to execute on both sides of it, and they did a better job than we did.”

Illinois only committing 11 turnovers against Tennessee’s defense 

“Yeah, they’re no joke now. And I may be wrong, but I think they’ve won every game by at least 15. I mean, I think they’ve beaten the brakes off people, and they do it because of their defense. And I knew it was gonna be a really ugly game offensively, or had a feeling it would be, because I think we’re really good at defense. And, you know, 11 turnovers is a pretty low number against them. But it’s still, you know, a couple that we had, you want back. We’ve got, we got to be able to clean those up.

“And I thought there was a couple fouls that could have been called. And I’ve never heard of that rule before, that you can’t … you’ve got to be in a shooting motion if you get your arms swiped. You know, never heard of that, so I’ve got to look that one up in the book. I’ve got to send that one (to the officials) and see what he tells me. But they said he wasn’t, he was trying to draw a foul and not in the shooting motion, and he wasn’t going to give him a call because of that. So I’ve never heard of that. I’ve done this 38 years … but yeah, we can’t turn it over. You know, that ends up being a turnover late, and we can’t do that.”

Tennessee having to take 20 jumpers off the dribble, the play of the Illinois defense 

“That’s what we do. It’s what we do. We don’t want to give you threes. We don’t want to give you, you know, catch-and-shoot threes. We’re gonna try to take ’em away. I thought we executed our game plan pretty well. We were pretty soft on. (Felix) Okpara wasn’t even involved. (Jahmai) Mashack, he’s only had three games in his career where he’s taken over six shots. I was hoping he would take 26, because we weren’t going to guard him, and then clog all the other stuff up. So again they found enough. They found enough from Gainey. A couple of those were scouting report mistakes, and we’ll get better at those.”

How Illinois tried to handle the foul trouble in the first half, with so many players having two fouls

“That part was easy, because the game was close, we were right there. If the game had gone (differently)  … you know, I bought Kylan in for a minute or two. Trey had a few. Tomi had picked up a couple just protecting the rim. But as long as the game was close, I didn’t have to go much either way. I thought our bench did a nice job of fighting that. But yeah, I thought that was pretty easy, as long as game’s close.”

How Illinois dealt with Tennessee’s physicality 

I just told our coaches I thought the Northwestern game was much more physical. The only difference was they didn’t call any fouls for 18 minutes in the first half of the Northwestern game, and now we shoot 60 (foul shots) in the first half of this one. And you know, that’s all I told the officials going into halftime — just, ‘Call the second half like you called the first.’ But physicality is part of the game. That’s Big 10 play. It’s the common thread that we know we’re going to get when you face Michigan State or when you face some of these big teams.

“And Rick’s won a lot of games because his teams guard. And I don’t care if you go back to Kevin Durant-led teams, or you go back to any of his others, TJ Ford and all those other great ones he had at Texas, his team’s always guard, and there’s always a physicality about them.”

The problem on two Illinois inbounds that led to turnovers 

“Poor execution, plain and simple.”