INDIANAPOLIS — For the second game in a row, the Illinois Fighting Illini women’s basketball team had problems closing out an opponent in the fourth quarter.
On Thursday night in the Big Ten Tournament at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, the 10th-seeded Nebraska Cornhuskers rallied from a 7-point deficit in the game’s final 10 minutes to beat Illinois 74-70, advancing to play second-seeded UCLA in the quarterfinals.
“This game just comes down to, again, the fourth quarter and really our last five minutes again,” said Illinois coach Shauna Green, whose team surrendered a fourth-quarter lead in a regular-season finale loss to Michigan 78-69 on Sunday. “It’s something that we’ve struggled with the last few games … everything we’ve been talking about was finishing plays, getting those rebounds. It’s why we lost really the Michigan game, and we did the same thing tonight. We got stops, and down the stretch could not get the rebound. You just can’t win in March when you’re doing those things.
“So those are controllables for us. It’s what we hang our hat on. Just too many mishaps in the last five minutes that cost us the game.”
And the Illini players completely agree with their coach.
“It’s just a lot of little things we have to clean up,” said Illinois senior Kendall Bostic, who finished with 19 points with 16 of those coming in the first half. “That’s just us on the court. There’s no excuse for it, there’s no reason for it to happen. We have to be able to lock into that and say we’ve got to do it.
“We have to have all five on the floor. It can’t be four of us or three of us. It has to be all five willing to do whatever we need to do to win.”
All nine players that played for Nebraska (21-11) scored in the contest with freshman Britt Prince having a team-high 17 including consecutive jumpers in the fourth quarter to tie the game at 65 with 2:23 left. Jessica Petrie gave the Cornhuskers a lead they would never relinquish with a 3-pointer, she also had an easy layup on an inbounds pass from Prince in the game’s final minute.
Illinois (21-9) were basically limited to just six scorers because of season-ending injuries to players like Makira Cook and Gretchen Dolan, allowing the Cornhuskers to outscore the Illini 22-7 in points off the bench.
“They obviously have a lot more players than we have to put in there,” Green said. “We’re just not deep and we’re not that big, so they took advantage of it, so credit them. None of this takes away from, again, this team. I’m really proud of them, what we’ve done with the adversity we’ve had this year. Are they running out of gas? I don’t know. I’m never going to say that. I told them in the locker room again there’s no excuses. We’re never going to sit here and talk about that.
“Nebraska made more plays down the stretch than we did, and we’ve got to figure out how we need to execute and rebound and be physical down the stretch and make winning plays down the stretch. That’s what we’re going to attack in this week off and leading into the NCAA Tournament.”
After winning the WBIT championship last season, the Illini are projected to get a possible 8-9 seed in the NCAA Tournament when the pairings are announced next weekend.
“I actually talked about that just now in the locker room. I said, remember what our mindset was last year and how mad we were up in Minneapolis,” said Green after Illinois lost in last year’s Big Ten Tournament. “We had a complete change of our approach, and we were going to go into this WBIT, and we were going to win it. If we’re going to be in it, we’re going to win it. So I said we need to have that same approach going into the NCAA Tournament.
“There’s no way we deal and have the success we had this year through the adversity we faced — losing two top players … without the adversity we went through last year and without the WBIT championship run.”
Genesis Bryant had a game-high 20 for Illinois with Adalia McKenzie recording her second double-double of the season with 16 points and a career-high 10 assists.