By Ryan Burnett

So I was having luch with on of my friends today and they told me a story about the great Bill Russell. Apparently back in the day Celtics great used to rate his performance after every game on a scale of 1-100. And when his career was over, after 963 NBA games, 11 NBA titles, can you believe the best grade the greatest big man in the history of basketball ever gave himself was a 68. Unbelievable. That story inspired me to start rating game performances on a similar rating system, albeit one with a much more reasonable curve. So without further ado here’s Illinois’ report card (ordered by quality of performance) for the game they just played against the Minnesota Gophers.  

92     Mike Davis, F: Dominated the boards and gave the Gophers big men fits the entire second half. Clearly the Illini’s best offensive weapon tonight, 6-11 from the field.

78     Chester Frazier, G: One of the quietest good performances you’ll see all year. He only his one of his four shoots, but he always seemed to be facilitating what little offense the Illini could muster. Defensively he crawled into Lawrence Westbrook’s ass at tip-off and stayed there all night. He held the Gophers leading scorer to 2-10 from the field, and finished the night with four steals. Niiiiiice.

73     Demitri McCamey, G: Looked kind of half into the game all night, and his shot seemed a tad off. Ended up hitting a couple of threes, but generally a very quiet night for the Illini’s leading scorer. 

60     Trent Meachum, G: Didn’t shoot the ball all that well, but he made as many threes in this game as everyone else combined. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

59     Calvin Brock, G: Apparently, he managed four steals too, but if you told me he hadn’t even stepped on the court I would have believed you. 

39     Mike Tisdale, C: An absolute no-show for this game. Ralph Sampson III pretty much got the shots he wanted all night long, lucky for him they stopped feeding the Sampson in the 2nd half.

83     Bruce Weber, Coach: Seems to have gotten the team to refocus a bit. They won both halves and played a pretty good defensive game (although the final score might leave you to think it was a great defensive effort, Minnesota’s horrendous shooting id half of the work for them). Still though, this teams doesn’t look a damn thing like the team that went 14-2 for the ‘08 portion of this years schedule (which included wins over Missouri, K-State, Purdue, and Georgia).