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Welcome to "Green Street," your dose of women's college basketball news from Illini beat writer and AP Top 25 voter Joe Vozzelli. He'll offer up insight on Shauna Green's Illini team and the women's game at large every week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Injuries have been a rather obvious storyline throughout Shauna Green's time as the Illinois women's basketball coach.
That the Illini have overcome a shorthanded roster at times -- and thrived, with two NCAA tournament appearances, a first NCAA tournament win in 25 years and a WBIT championship -- has also been an equally important storyline.
With the news, however, that Illinois would be missing two key rotation pieces for the full 2025-26 season, as freshman forward Manuela Alves and freshman guard Erica Finney -- have been ruled out at least has brought to the forefront talk of whether the Illini need to take any preventative measures.
But Green made clear on Wednesday ahead of Illinois lone exhibition game against Division II Maryville that the Illini don't feel like it has to change its approach.
"You know, I always look at it any time an injury happens," the fourth-year Illinois coach said. " I'm like, 'Is this something that could have been avoided?' I do look at each one and I don't think they're connected to we have to change something.
"(Erica Finney) had been dealing with some of this stuff and an ACL is always something we really have only had two in my time here with Lety (Vasconcelos) and obviously Manuela. You look back Gretchen (Dolan) was kind of a preexisting (issue). Even Jada (Peebles) with an Achilles (tendon injury) I don't know how you prevent that stuff. I've gone through everything with Kilee (Fletcher), with Autumn (Taylor) and looked at anything we can do. You know, we're always trying to evaluate what can we do better? Do we need to tweak anything? We don't see any correlations, but something we're going to continue to evaluate."