Illini fail to get final shot at keeping record perfect
CHAMPAIGN - Chester Frazier lay sprawled in the lane, his left arm shielding his eyes.
His badly bruised left thigh throbbed, but the Illinois senior guard's heart hurt more because the final horn sounded Tuesday night with the ball still in his hands.
Clemson edged Illinois 76-74 in a rousing ACC/Big Ten Challenge battle at Assembly Hall when the Illini couldn't get off a shot on the game's final possession.
When Clemson's Demontez Stitt missed the front end of a 1-and-1 with 11 seconds left, Illinois' Demetri McCamey pushed the ball up the floor just as Bruce Weber instructed during his timeout moments before.
"We ran a double ball screen with Trent (Meacham) in it and we were going to flare for Trent," Weber said. "I thought Trent was wide open. I guess (Demetri) didn't see him."
McCamey, smothered at the top of the key, passed to Frazier with one second left. Frazier (7 points, career-high 12 assists) started to drive toward the lane and looked stunned when the horn blared.
The anticlimactic ending brought a jarring close to a wild game played end to end the whole way thanks to Clemson's press.
Illinois (6-1) held an 8-point halftime lead, but that slipped away swiftly as the Tigers' defense took its toll.
The Illini committed 10 turnovers in the first 15 minutes of the second half - several of them careless miscues - and Clemson (8-0) turned them into 19 points.
"I thought our pressure had a cumulative effect as the game wore on just in terms of wearing them down," Tigers coach Oliver Purnell said. "We were tired certainly at the end. And we always tell our club, 'If we're tired, then they've got to be tired because we're used to playing this way.' "
For most of the night, though, Illinois sophomore forward Mike Davis (career-high 28 points) looked like he'd been waiting all his life to play against a team like Clemson.
During a 23-minute stretch that began with 10:16 left in the first half, Davis poured in 26 points to turn a 21-18 deficit into a 61-59 lead.
The 6-foot-9 speedster ran the break for dunks, swished 15-foot baseline jumpers and generally whipped the 10,000 Illini fans into a frenzy. But Davis scored his last points with 7:23 to play, which became Stitt's cue to take over.
The Tigers kept giving their point guard the ball in the frontcourt and telling him to break down the defense.
When Stitt wasn't weaving to the hoop for easy layups and his team-high 18 points, he was driving and kicking for his team-high 6 assists.
"We thought their point guard was the key for them," Weber said. "He's their energy. For us, it's Chester. And he just wore down. His leg finally gave in.
"He said he couldn't even bend it, and he's trying to guard one of the quickest guys we're going to face."