Two weeks after losing to Winthrop at home, Illinois almost suffered another embarrassing loss Tuesday night at the State Farm Center.
But visiting IUPUI didn't have Malcolm Hill.
The Illini senior scored 32 points, 23 of them coming after halftime, to lead his team to a comeback win over the Jaguars, the home squad winning by an 85-77 final score in Champaign.
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This one wasn’t over until it was over, with IUPUI leading multiple times throughout the second half and refusing to go away once Illinois finally did grab a lead for good with about five minutes to play.
The Illini scored the game’s first 10 points but watched that double-digit lead disappear and trailed for the final eight minutes of the first half, though were down by just a point at the break. Both teams shot incredibly well over the first 20 minutes, the Jaguars shooting 51.9 percent from the floor and the Illini shooting 50 percent. But IUPUI benefited from eight Illinois turnovers, scoring 14 points off them.
But in the second half, the Jaguars’ hot shooting dropped off while the Illini got white hot. Illinois shot 60 percent after halftime, though it didn’t result in a second-half runaway.
Six straight IUPUI points in the middle of the second half flipped a modest Illinois lead into a three-point edge for the Jaguars. But Hill hit a 3-pointer with a little more than six and a half minutes to go to tie the game at 68, and Mike Thorne Jr.'s three-point play put the Illini ahead for good. IUPUI wasn't going to go away quietly and answered a Hill bucket that made it a five-point game with back-to-back baskets to bring it to a one-point gap with under four minutes to play. But Hill poured in another basket 30 seconds later and hit a 3 with two and a half minutes left to push the Illinois edge to six. It didn't dip below three from there and hit eight in the game's final seconds.
Big Ten
The Illini finished the night shooting 55.1 percent from the field and scored 24 points at the free-throw line, compared to just 15 there for the Jaguars.
Hill was marvelous in the second half, playing all 20 minutes and scoring 23 points on 9-for-13 shooting with a pair of 3-pointers.
Leron Black also had a big night for Illinois, scoring 16 points and grabbing nine rebounds, six of those boards coming in the second half. Jalen Coleman-Lands scored nine points on three made 3-pointers, and Thorne and Tracy Abrams each had seven points.
The Illini are now on a three-game winning streak, this win following up last week’s victories over North Carolina State and VCU. Of course, those wins stopped a three-game losing streak during a nightmarish week that started with that aforementioned loss to Winthrop and ended with back-to-back defeats at the hands of West Virginia and Florida State by a combined 43 points.
After all of it, Illinois has a 7-3 record with three more non-conference games against Central Michigan, BYU and Missouri before the start of Big Ten play.