Texas Basketball: 3 takeaways from the OT collapse against Illinois

Texas didn’t have a primary initiator to rely on late, and it showed

Two of the duds for me down the stretch in this game just happen to be two of the most important Longhorns players. Carr and sophomore standout guard Tyrese Hunter didn’t show up when they needed to down the stretch in the second half and in overtime.

All you have to do is look at the stat sheet to see why Carr and Hunter were limiting what Texas could do on the offensive end of the floor down the stretch.

Carr had maybe his worst game of the season so far. He put up nine points on a miserable 3-of-14 shooting from the field, 0-of-5 from beyond the arc, and 3-of-3 from the free-throw line. Carr also registered three rebounds, five assists, three steals, and two turnovers.

At least Carr made up for his lackluster night offensively with some important steals on the defensive end.

Meanwhile, Hunter pretty much faded off the offensive end of the court down the stretch. He missed each of his last four field goal attempts in this game. And Hunter missed a key free-throw that allowed Illinois to ultimately come back and tie the game to send it to overtime.

Hunter picked quite the time to miss the front end of one-and-one free-throw attempts in the dying minutes of the second half. It’s worth noting that was just his second free throw miss of the season and the first since the opener against UTEP on Nov. 7.

All in all, Texas needed one of these two guards to show up in clutch time down the stretch in a pretty energized neutral site environment at MSG. But Carr and Hunter wound up missing a lot of important field goals late and had some bad turnovers to allow Illinois to ultimately run away with the lead in overtime.