Penn State men’s basketball finally feels Myreon Jones’ absence in loss to Illinois
Penn State and Illinois both entered Tuesday’s matchup between the two teams with a cloud of uncertainty lingering over them.
Each team’s best guard was day-to-day heading into the matchup. Illinois’ Ayo Dosunmu had missed its previous game against Rutgers with a leg injury. Penn State’s Myreon Jones missed the team’s previous three games with an illness.
At the start of the day, neither player’s status was determined. By the end of it, their statuses determined the outcome of the matchup.
Dosunmu warmed up with the team and was deemed ready to go, playing 37 minutes. Jones was ruled out early in the day according to CBS Sports’ Jon Rothstein.
That made the difference as Illinois took down Penn State, 62-56, on the back of a prolific performance by Dosunmu.
“Easily right there at the top,” Illinois head coach Brad Underwood said when asked where Dosunmu’s performance ranks in his career. “That’s a top-10 team he did that against on the road.”
The sophomore Illinois guard put up 24 points on only 15 field goal attempts, and that was with him struggling at the free throw line, where he only made 5-of-8 attempts.
The Nittany Lions tried several tactics to stifle him, but none worked as well as they would have liked.
“He’s a great player,” Penn State sophomore guard Myles Dread said. “Great players make great plays. That’s about it.”
Those big-time plays came in no matter what the Nittany Lions did. Their most successful strategy created openings for other Illinois players to succeed.
They hard-hedged on ball screens, a tactic that involves a screener’s defender attacking the ball handler to create a quick double team, to push Dosunmu well beyond the perimeter. That strategy requires defenders behind the screening action to rotate quickly and correctly to prevent the screener from getting wide open, and it requires the screener’s defender to quickly rotate back and level the playing field.
Penn State’s defense didn’t rotate quickly enough on several occasions and it gave Illinois freshman center Kofi Cockburn, who frequently set the ball screens, to roll to the rim for a wide open look or a matchup with a much smaller defender.
“Their ball screens were hurting us,” Chambers said. “He was living in the paint so we had to do anything we could and then we had to rotate behind him ... He made some good decisions out of the ball screens. Maybe we were too high in certain situations, but toward the end I was definitely trying to trap him to get the ball out of his hands and let somebody else beat us.”
Guards like Dosunmu can make all of the difference in the world for an offense because they can find a hole in just about any defense. Penn State’s version of that missed his fourth game in a row Tuesday night.
Jones’ absence was finally noticeable after the Nittany Lions took care of business in the team’s first three games without him.
“I do,” Chambers said when asked if Jones’ absence affected the team. “But I don’t want to use that as an excuse because Illinois played so well and Brad did such a great job. But it definitely is (affecting us), you can see it’s wearing on us a little bit.”
The sophomore guard is Penn State’s second-leading scorer on the season with 14.1 points per game and is its better shooter, making 41.3% of his 5.7 attempts per game from beyond the arc. His absence had a big impact on the Nittany Lions’ offense. It allowed Illinois to throw extra defenders at senior forward and leading scorer Lamar Stevens without many repercussions. That defense held the school’s third all-time leading scorer to only 13 points on 11 field goal attempts.
“I wouldn’t say Lamar struggled,” Chambers said. “I would say he had two or three guys on top of him. I thought he was patient. I thought he did a nice job of trying to get everybody shots. I thought some of these guys had some open ones that they’d been making and they just didn’t go in tonight. That happens. That’s the game of basketball.”
Jones had been so good before his injury that he filled Underwood with fear when he saw him on film.
“I saw (what he did against) Michigan State,” Underwood said. “That was scary ... He gives them a secondary handler ... He can handle the ball and gives you a different threat from three ... Over the course of time you miss that.”
Dosunmu’s presence and Jones’ absence had a drastic impact on the game. Chambers could be heard talking about Dosunmu on Fox Sports 1’s All-Access broadcast of the game. The Penn State head coach knew his team didn’t do well enough against the Illinois guard and laid that out clearly to the bench as Trent Frazier was about to shoot a free throw to ice the game for Illinois with 10 seconds left.
“(Dosunmu) singlehandedly kicked our ass,” Chambers said. “And that’s why you gotta take pride in defending.”
This story was originally published February 19, 2020 at 8:00 AM.
