Pur Didn't

With Michigan beating Purdue last night and doing so pretty soundly, Illinois' chances for sharing in the Big Ten title seem slim to none.  Illinois is currently in second place, but even if it wins tonight at USC Illinois will be two games behind Michigan.  There will be a head-to-head game when Michigan visits Illinois on February 27 and before that Michigan has a game against Duke, but I suspect the motivation for Michigan in those games will be entirely how they appear in the national rankings and the seedings in the NCAA Tournament.  Currently Michigan is number 1 in the former and I suspect if they beat Duke and beat Illinois they will be number 1 in the latter, regardless of how they do in the Big Ten Tournament.

But there is another factor that comes into play that motivates teams.  Injuries become a big deal, especially when those happen to star players. Quite recently, some of the top teams have just lost players due to injury.  Illinois is in that situation with Andrej Stojaković, who has a high-ankle sprain.  If a starter can't play due to injury, the rest of the team must adjust.  There is learning in that and now, given how close we are to March Madness, there is a lot of stress in that as well.  Illinois is on the other side of that cycle with the return of Kylan Boswell.  The sort of learning that's needed will happen over the next few games, and mainly during the practices to prepare for them.

It makes you wonder whether a team can play so as to avoid player injury.  One obvious way to do this is to play fewer games.  This gets me to consider the conference post-season tournaments and whether they continue to make sense.  For the Big Ten, in particular, there are 18 teams in the conference now and each team plays 20 conference games in the regular season.  With teams on both the East Coast and the West Coast, the travel to away games is onerous.  Illinois's last game of the regular season is at Maryland, while its previous game is a home game.  This, in itself, seems absurd to me.  Then there is that the finals of the Big Ten Tournament occur on Selection Sunday, indeed with the game ending right before the selection show begins.  This means that a team that makes it to the finals may have a first round game on Thursday, with not a lot of time in between to rest and prepare.  So there are reasons to sandbag in the post-season tournament, quite apart from avoiding player injury.  

Of course, these post-season conference tournaments attract a lot of viewers.  For many fans, it gives them a chance to watch teams from rival conferences as well as to keep watching their favorite team, as long as it is still alive in the conference tournament.  And the more the fans watch, the more money is made by the teams and their conferences.  But one has to wonder whether the players suffer as a consequence.  

Getting back to Purdue, which to open the season was ranked #1 nationally, I have to wonder why.  Are they underperforming now or were they overrated early on?  And for them, might the Big Ten Tournament be yet another opportunity for them to turn it around?

We'll see.

Progressive Taxation at the Local Level - My Take

I received my mail-in ballot for the primary here in Illinois, which includes some items that are specific to Champaign County.  The County has been operating under deficits for a while and needs a way to generate more revenue and/or to reduce its level of spending.  I'm going to focus on the former here.  Raising revenue for local government is done via taxation.  There seems to be two options for that.  Either increase the sales tax or increase the property tax.  

The sales tax is generally regarded as a regressive tax.  Even people of modest means have to buy groceries and other necessities.  They pay the sales tax when doing so.  The property tax is more progressive.  Its magnitude depends on the assessed value of the home.  Wealthier people tend to have higher valued homes.  So, increasing the property tax tends to put the incidence of the tax onto wealthier people. 

Now, here is an important sidebar.  Wealthier people are more prone to itemize on their Federal income tax returns.  The property tax is one of the itemized deductions one can take.  From 2018-2024 there was a cap of $10,000 imposed on that deduction.  In 2025, the cap was raised to $40,000.  For Champaign County, I would guess that most homes would have assessed value that keeps their property taxes well under the cap.  Readers of this post can find the Federal tax brackets here.  The point is that if Champaign County raises the property tax, the actual burden on homeowners will likely be only a fraction of that, with that fraction determined by what tax bracket the homeowner is in.

Here is another sidebar.  I came of age when Reagan was President and it was commonplace then for voters to be told to vote their pocketbooks.  Were that to happen now, wealthier voters would embrace the sales tax increase, while voters of more modest means would endorse the property tax increase.  What I want to argue here is that wealthier voters need to show some leadership and get beyond voting their pocketbooks.

Taking myself as an example, in my household we are financially comfortable.  A modest increase in the property tax would not impact our quality of life one iota.  Under the current circumstances, it would be best for folks like me to embrace paying more in property taxes.  If enough did that it would show that selfishness doesn't always win at the ballot box.

I truly wish we could send that message in a credible way at the national level.  But for now, we should make a start of it by doing so in Champaign County.

Addition by Subtraction

Here is a quickie about the Illinois Men's Basketball Team.  A bit of a puzzle is that Kylan Boswell has a broken hand and has not played the last several games.  He was one of if not the best players on the team.  Certainly, he was the best defensive player.  He could really lock down the other team's best offensive player.  Yet Illinois seems to be playing better in his absence. 

One reason, little noted, is that we've gotten taller, having Jake Davis, who really is a forward, take the slot that Boswell had.  Davis is listed as 6-6 while Boswell is listed as 6-2.  Davis is not much of a ballhandler, but Mirkovic is and he is doing much more of that than he was before Boswell was hurt.  This is important because, as my prior post focus was on Keaton Wagler, while Wagler is now the team's star and media darling, the performance burden needs to be shared.  If it's all on the shoulders of one kid, he will wear down eventually. 

Another point that hasn't been noted much at all is that in the Big Ten they don't press much, except near the end of the game when the team that is behind might press to generate a turnover.  But good teams in other conferences do press and the question is whether Illinois can handle it well or not.  Illinois' big guys are reasonably good passers, with Tomislav Ivisic elite, as Brad Underwood likes to say, so maybe we can break the press by getting it into a big who can then pass the ball over the defense.  Against Nebraska in the half court, it seemed we had many very high passes over the defense from one side of the court to the other.

But if the ball goes into Wagler and he is then trapped, might that result in a turnover?  It happened against Nebraska and fortunately we got fouls called on them in that instance.  But if this was done earlier in the game, it might have gone differently.

Teams that press a lot need to be deep at guard, so they can rotate in fresh players who can keep up the intensity.  It seems to me that apart from just having a totally off night, which is surely possible, this is how Illinois might get beat.  It wouldn't be by trying to match us in rebounding.  It would be by forcing us into many more turnovers than is our norm.  

There are still 9 games left in the regular Big Ten season, with a few very tough games remaining, and then there will be the Big Ten Tournament.  At around that time Boswell should be ready to return to the lineup.  It seems reasonable to expect him to be not quite on his game at first.  At that point, might there be subtraction by addition?