Ayo Dosunmu has a pretty good answer for anyone worried about a Minnesota winter: “I was born cold.” The Wolves put that line on a graphic this week. It’s worth stopping for the story behind it.
Ayo, in his own words
In his November 5 Players’ Tribune essay, Ayo remembers doing exercises during White Sox commercial breaks and his father working overnight UPS shifts around school pickups and basketball. He also remembers shoveling a shooting lane in the snow. Chicago supplied plenty of practice for the cold.
The story also makes room for Darius Brown, the friend and young basketball player who was killed when Ayo was 11. Ayo wants readers to know Darius as a person, including the friendship and shared love of basketball. Their “Jet Life” saying has stayed with him.
Ayo describes arriving in Minnesota with two bags, feeling welcomed and gradually finding his place. He writes about competing with Anthony Edwards and learning from Rudy Gobert’s professionalism. Signing his summer extension made him emotional because of the life behind it. His conclusion: “There’s no place else I want to be.”
The part about Gobert’s professionalism floored me because I will always remember him as the dude that purposefully coughed on microphones in March 2020 when being asked about his thoughts about Covid.
Read the full piece when you have a few minutes. Ayo tells it well.
The Illinois part of the trip
The Illinois announcement from draft night in 2021 is a good companion to that essay. The Morgan Park graduate went 38th overall to Chicago after a junior season with averages of 20.1 points, 6.3 rebounds and 5.3 assists.
He left as a consensus first-team All-American and the Bob Cousy Award winner. Illinois went 24–7, won the Big Ten Tournament and earned a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament. Those are some pretty good accomplishments to fit into one college season.
Earlier this year, Illinois selected Ayo for its Athletics Hall of Fame class. The announcement puts another part of his career in perspective: 1,504 points, and the first Illini to lead the team in scoring as a freshman, sophomore and junior.
That consistency is easy to appreciate when the college career is laid out together. We got three seasons of Ayo taking on a big assignment. Now we get to follow the next chapters, with a little more of his own account of how he got here.
Roger and Bruce at Mackey
Roger Powell Jr. had quite a Friday night. His Valparaiso team beat Purdue 83–80 in double overtime at Mackey Arena on November 6, with Justus McNair hitting a three at the horn to win it. We watched it live in the Dunker house and it was so much fun.
Then Roger got to talk about it with Bruce Weber: “Are you proud of me?” 🥹
Illinois on BTN shared the postgame interview. Give it a minute and 48 seconds. This is a good one.
What a night for the Rev.
Malcolm and Marcus in Romania
Malcolm Hill and Marcus Domask have a game on the same floor Sunday. You’ll have to look a little farther than Champaign to find it.
Hill’s U-BT Cluj-Napoca hosts Domask’s Bosna BH Telecom in Romania. Malcolm just led his team in scoring on a rough night in Tenerife. Marcus helped turn a close game in Vienna with five straight points. Before their clubs meet, let’s catch up on what the two former Illini have been doing.
Malcolm’s 21 came on a difficult night
We checked in on Hill earlier this week. Thursday brought a bigger scoring night and a much tougher result: 21 points in Cluj’s 113–73 loss at La Laguna Tenerife.
Tenerife made 17 of its 31 threes. All twelve of its players scored, and the home team led 59–41 at halftime. That is a lot for one scorer to try to overcome.
Cluj fell to 2–4 in the EuroCup. Center Uroš Plavšić was absent, according to the league’s game summary. That gives us some context for the team’s night, but it doesn’t explain away forty points.
The official team highlights include Malcolm finishing inside, making a sidestep three and cutting along the baseline. There’s more to his scoring here than waiting for a three to come his way.
Marcus helped Bosna hold on
Domask’s October 30 game at Vienna gives us a different kind of check-in. Bosna won 88–81, and Marcus finished with 11 points, six rebounds and two steals in 19:18. He made five of his six shots.
The timing was the good part. Vienna had briefly moved ahead late in the third quarter when Domask scored five consecutive points. Bosna went into the fourth with a 69–66 lead and held on for the road win. The ABA League named him its Man of the Match.
If you haven’t followed Marcus since Illinois, he’s wearing No. 3 for Bosna now. The club announced his arrival in August from Oostende, following earlier stops with Frankfurt and the Windy City Bulls. His professional route has already covered quite a bit of ground.
Sunday’s game is in the regional ABA League, a separate competition from Thursday’s EuroCup game. The official listing has tipoff at 4 a.m. Central on November 8, noon in Cluj-Napoca, at BT Arena. That’s an early one for us.
Bosna coach Dario Gjergja warned against judging Cluj by its last two games, pointing to the quality of those opponents and Cluj’s depleted rotation. Cluj coach Mihai Silvășan described both teams as chasing one of four places in the next stage.
That gives the matchup some stakes beyond our two familiar names. Hill’s team needs a better defensive afternoon. Domask’s group has already shown it can finish a tight one on the road. Two former Illini, and a useful reason to check a score from Romania.
A November 7 throwback
November 7, 2022: Illinois opened its 118th men’s basketball season with an 87–57 win over Eastern Illinois at State Farm Center.
There were a lot of introductions to make. The pregame notes listed eight newcomers, including three power-conference transfers. All five regular starters from the previous season’s Big Ten championship team were gone, along with 86 percent of its scoring. No. 23 Illinois had plenty to replace.
Hawkins got things moving with 18 points and five three-pointers before halftime. He finished with a then-career-high 23 points and 12 rebounds. Shannon scored 24 in his Illinois debut, matching his career high at the time.
Dainja added 17 points and 10 rebounds off the bench, with eight makes in nine shots. It was his first collegiate double-double. That’s a pretty efficient way to introduce yourself.
Illinois led 46–31 at halftime and won the rebounding battle 53–30. Twenty offensive rebounds helped produce a 21–4 advantage in second-chance points. The new group had some figuring out to do, but getting another shot was already working.
Four years later, that box score brings three familiar names back together. Shannon, Hawkins and Dainja combined for 64 points that night. Plenty of new faces, and plenty of reasons to keep watching.
This Day in Illini History
November 8, 2024: Thirteen assists. Three shot attempts.
That was Kasparas Jakucionis against SIUE in his second college game. He finished with 12 points, eight rebounds and 13 assists in Illinois’ 90–58 win. Nine of his points came at the foul line. He needed only one basket to get within two rebounds of a triple-double.
Those 13 assists tied the Illinois freshman record Frank Williams set against Loyola-Chicago on December 30, 1999. Frank scored five points that night while helping Illinois pile up 107. Almost 25 years later, Kasparas matched him.
There were plenty of targets. Ben Humrichous made five threes, Tre White and Will Riley made three apiece, and Tomislav Ivisic led the scoring with 18. Illinois finished with 21 assists and only five turnovers.
The evening also had a fitting backdrop. Illinois had scheduled its ring and banner ceremony celebrating the previous season’s Big Ten Tournament championship and Elite Eight appearance before tipoff. Then the new freshman point guard put his name next to Frank’s in the record book.
Let’s go, Illini!!