Welcome me into the Illinois Inguire podcast. It is Jeremy Warner Live, the Williams Arena in Minnesota and Deripiper are back in Illinois the align eye, find a way to bounce back.

It's kind of going back and forth, back and forth.

You feel good or not feel good about Illinois basketball, but you feel good after tonight.

95 to 74.

We'll talk about a different starting lineup, a different kind of approach to the lineup,

maybe a smaller lineup as well, a different style of play a little bit in this one as Illinois goes more inside out and doesn't rely on the three-pointers as much, but they shot better from the three.

So we'll talk about that. But Derek Piper, it all starts with the five-star freshman. Yes, we're going to count Casper Seacchionis as a five five-star freshman along with Will Riley, as they combined for 51 points tonight.

Will Riley, 27 points is most against a high major team.

Career high nine rebounds, career high seven assists.

Casper Siacoshaughan is 24 points.

Big bounce back performance for him.

So the wrist feels great.

But you saw him in attack mode, really in transition as well. Boy, Brad Underwood went the one and done route. And both those guys looked like one and done. Derek. And it's kind of a reminder. If you get those guys going at the same time, Illinois is really dangerous. And this felt like one of the first times this year. We saw them going at the same time. And boy, it's fun.

Yeah, no, that's where I was going to go, is that we've been talking about it recently.

When will you have both of those guys clicking together? And I tweeted this later in the game and just to continue to see what Will Riley's doing. It's felt like, because we saw what KJ was established to be over the first two and a half months

of this season, one of the next steps, regardless of all the other stuff that's gone on

with Illinois, to like unlocking your ceiling is to get Will Riley to click and to be

comfortable and to be himself and to find this mode that he's found here down the stretch

of the last couple of weeks.

So for him to go the way he's been going and showing no signs of letting up,

only giving Brad more reason to double down and triple down on minutes and usage and putting the ball in his hands.

And he's continuing to make really good decisions.

...