Men's Basketball hosts Illinois State on Saturday at 5 p.m.

ILLINOIS STATE (9-8, 3-2) at SOUTHERN ILLINOIS (10-8, 2-3)
Jan. 13, 2018 • 5 p.m. CT
Carbondale, Ill. • SIU Arena (8,284)
Salukis lead series, 78-74 (H: 47-19, A: 14-29, N: 5-2)

CARBONDALE, Ill. — Southern Illinois returns to action on Saturday night when it hosts Illinois State at 5 p.m. in a game televised live on CBS Sports Network. Discounted general admission tickets in the Dawg Pound are available for $10.

Illinois State has won the last four meetings between the teams and nine of the last 12. SIU's three wins during that span were at home in 2014, 2015 and 2016. SIU head coach Barry Hinson is 12-17 lifetime against the Redbirds, including 3-8 at SIU.

Coach Hinson met with the media after Thursday's practice.

What's the scouting report on Illinois State?
The first thing you see right off the bat is (Milik) Yarbrough, (Phil) Fayne and (Keyshawn) Evans. Those three guys are having a really good year, specifically in conference play. Same typical Illinois State team — extremely athletic, extremely long. They do a great job of pounding the ball inside. It will be a big challenge for us on the athletic side of the game and it will be a big challenge for us on the big side of the game.

Does the return of (David) Ndiaye concern you at all with Kavion (Pippen) guarding him?
Sure. I think any time you run a 7-footer out there it concerns all of us. We haven't had great success against 7-footers. If you look what happened at Valpo, their two 7-footers put 28 points and 10 rebounds on us, so yeah, it's a big concern for us.

Defensively, you've been hot and cold. What have you done to become more consistent?
It was really magnified the other night at Bradley when you get four chances of one point (deficit) and a chance to get stops and they go 4-for-4. The game that I would tell you I was extremely disappointed in more than anything would be Valparaiso. If you walk on the floor with a defensive mindset, if you walk on the floor with the energy to guard, it just affects everything for the better, even offensively. The other night we got caught up in, especially the first half, our guards were extremely selfish and we were 1-for-10 from the perimeter and our bigs were scoring inside. We're letting how we shoot the ball affect how we guard. We just can't do that.

With both teams snake-bit by injuries, how does that play a role in this game?
Let's get one thing straight — they think they've been snakebitten, but there's nobody in the country that's gone through what we've had. You can take any team of the 351 Division I programs — you keep asking me all the time, 'well they've had injuries' — no, no, no. They haven't had three guys out for the entire year. They haven't had four surgeries on one team. Nobody in the country has gone through what this basketball team has. I say that in a positive way of what these kids battle every day. Realistically the other night, we played seven players at Bradley and that was with Rudy (Stradnieks) playing nine minutes. We really just played six guys. If we just continue to get better at what we're doing, we have enough to win basketball games, but we just don't have any margin for error.

Would you agree that the team seems to be shooting better from 3-point?
I said this boldly at the start of the season — we won't be the worst 3-point shooting team — and we're not. Right now, if I'm not mistaken, we're fourth or fifth in the league, and that was before the other night. When we take good shots, we're as good as anybody shooting the three in our league. Our problem is we take bad threes, we take guarded threes, we take deep threes. If we would just have a little bit better attention span and focus on what type of threes are best for us, then we'd be a much better 3-point shooting team.

Can you comment on the Valley race?
I think Aaron Rogers needs to come in here and do this interview. Relax. Relax. We're in ninth place right now, and if we're fortunate enough to win on Saturday, we can be in third place. It's going to be that way all year long. If we panic early, that's what we talked to our team about today, it is a marathon not a sprint. Take it game by game, day by day, try to get better. We're focusing on Illinois State, we're focusing on getting better as a basketball team. All that stuff that we can't control — the race, the teams, the injuries, the sickness — we just have to push that to the side.

On paper, it looks like you match up well with Illinois State.
I don't think we match up well. I think their bigs are really good, very similar to what we played at Valpo. Our interior defense has got to really play well. Our perimeter defense with ball screens has to play well. We'll see. Everything we've talked about with our basketball team is how do we get on the floor defensively?

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