Martin shares thoughts after Illinois scrimmage
SOUTH CAROLINA GAMECOCKS BASKETBALL
South Carolina hosted Illinois this weekend in a closed scrimmage, a time-honored tradition of the college basketball season.
It’s a way for teams to do some work against someone not wearing the same logo, and Frank Martin said the Gamecocks got exactly what they wanted from this weekend’s outing.
“Oh yeah. Think about this: we play against each other and our guys are trained to execute our defense and our offense,” he said. “So anytime you’re asked to do something different than what we do, they don’t run it as fast and as crisp because it’s not what we practice. You go up and go against someone else, you have to run and you have to know how to defend their offense and how they teach it with different actions and screens and cuts then defensively how they defend.”
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This was the first time these two coaches scrimmaged each other with Martin welcoming in his former assistant back to Columbia for the joint practice Sunday.
Underwood, who was with Martin for a while at Kansas State and for one year at South Carolina, knows the Gamecocks’ system well. Sunday, he did a few things defensively to guard against some of Martin’s offensive staples, which was a good learning experience for South Carolina’s young players.
“Brad kind of schemed a little bit to defend us,” he said. “Our guys had to learn. They weren’t letting us do certain things to let us play offense a certain way so we had to play. I was real happy we were able to do that. The last couple years we would have gotten stagnant but yesterday we kept playing. I was happy to see that.”
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Illinois is coming off a tough year last year but returns a lot of the pieces from the 2019 team. The Illini are considered by KenPom to be the No. 35 team in the country and are predicted to go 19-12, 10-10 in the Big 10.
They return eight players from last year’s team, including Ayo Dosunmu, who was on the Big 10’s All-Freshman team last year and preseason All-Big 10 player this year.
The Illini, Martin said, operate at “a hundred miles an hour” offensively with how they execute sets, and thinks his defense did a good job for the most part this weekend.
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“I thought our guys were really good. The one thing we didn’t do well was we committed some bad fouls. We hadn’t fouled in our intrasquad scrimmages. Every time we brought referees in, our foul totals have been down from what they’ve been in the past," Martin said.
"Yesterday we committed more fouls than we needed to. That’s something we talked about today. I think that’s part of it being young guys and our defensive mindset of aggression and trying to understand a team coming at them a hundred miles per hour. I don’t mean a hundred miles per hour coming up the court but how they cut, how they pass, how they screen. We were there; we just used our hands for the wrong reasons. We committed fixable fouls.”
The Gamecocks host Columbia International Wednesday night at 7 p.m. for a free exhibition before starting their regular season a week later against North Alabama on Nov. 6.
