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.