Brad Underwood pushing for Offensive Rebounding efforts

Brad Underwood is a proven winner at Illinois. In recent years, Underwood has had Illinois basketball playing hard and tough which has resulted in a very successful winning record. One underrated aspect of Underwood’s teams has been the offensive rebounding efforts. Brad’s teams crash the glass and guys like Jacob Grandison, Da’Monte Williams, and Coleman Hawkins have done that at a high rate. With the talent level arguably as high as it has ever been in Champaign, Brad Underwood needs this team to play with that same grit and toughness that have made previous teams so successful.

Brad told the media today “It has been grinding at me and bothersome since then. It’s inexcusable to get 17% of your misses back… It’s the lowest in four years, I think, that we’ve had. We can’t do that. That’s effort. That’s not what we’ve done. We didn’t get anything from our guards. Again, I should have played the bench more. We’ll try to get better at it.”

The numbers.

Currently, Tomislav Ivisic and Morez Johnson Jr lead the team in rebounding. Though it is a small sample size of eight games, Ivisic averages 1.8 offensive rebounds per game while Johnson Jr. leads the team with 2.5 offensive rebounds per game (in 13.6 minutes per game). For how much Ivisic plays, he needs to get more offensive boards. Besides Ivisic and Morez, Kasparas Jakucionis is third on the team with only 1.1 offensive rebounds per game.

For reference, Ty Rodgers averaged 2.3 offensive rebounds per game during the 2023-2024 season. Also during last year, Quincy Guerrier averaged 1.7 offensive rebounds per game while Coleman Hawkins contributed 1.4 per game.

There are two possibilities for the offensive rebounding issue that Brad Underwood brings up. Morez Johnson Jr. could get more playing time. On the flip side, players like Tre White, Kylan Boswell, and Kasparas Jakucionis will make a concerted effort to help out on the offensive glass.

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