The University of Illinois has been playing collegiate basketball since 1905 and with few exceptions have done a remarkable job at winning consistently. The Illini basketball program has an all time record of 1710 wins and 925 losses and unlike many schools have played for over a century without a significant ‘down time’. Illinois plays in the Big 10 Conference and has qualified for the NCAA basketball tournament 30 times. Sixty eight Fighting Illini basketball players have been chosen in the NBA draft and three are currently playing in the league–Meyers Leonard of the Portland Trailblazers, Brian Cook of the Detroit Pistons and Deron Williams of the New Jersey Nets.
Over the 100+ years that the University of Illinois has been playing basketball they’ve had only three home courts beginning with Kenney Gym from 1905 to 1925. In 1925 the Illini moved in to Huff Hall which was later re-christened as Huff Gymnasium and would play their home games in the facility well in to the 1960’s though the building would continue to serve the University community until the 1990’s. In 1963, the Illinois basketball team moved in to Assembly Hall, now known as the State Farm Center. The building was praised for it’s unique design when it was first built and looks fresh even today.
As part of the Big ten Conference you can find the University of Illinois’ games on TV regularly. ESPN and the other national sports networks love to highlight teams from the Big 10. In addition, the Big 10 has their own television network and additional Illini games can be found there. Both ESPN and the Big ten Network have streaming Illinois basketball games online. Games that aren’t on any of the ESPN TV networks can often be found on the ESPN3 online streaming service. ESPN3 offers a wide variety of sports and teams in addition to their over the air programming. The ESPN3 stream is also available from tablets and phones but requires a cable TV subscription to access it. That is also the case with the Big 10 Network’s online offerings–it requires an extra subscription fee to access live game streams. Streaming Illinois basketball games live using the ESPN3 or Big 10 Network platform can be problematic even if you do have a subscription since there are frequent technical issues producing slow and unclear video.
The best solution is usually to watch University of Illinois live stream online. There are a number of comprehensive directories of live sports streaming where you can find just about any North American or International sport you want to watch–including college basketball. The names change from time to time but include Wiziwig, First Row Sports, Stream2Watch and others. The domain names change and new sites come online so a search for ‘live sports streaming’ or ‘college basketball streaming’ is a good way to locate the information you need. Don’t forget that different sites may focus on different sports or on different parts of the globe. There are plenty that target US sports fans so it should be easy to find college basketball games listed at a variety of sites.
These sites offer a remarkable variety of sports and games from North American and around the world. Many of the streams you find will be Flash based and will be as easy to access as a YouTube video. Others require the installation of a third party application like StreamTorrent or AceStream but are then capable of supporting a faster and clearer stream. It may take a search on several sites to find streaming Illinois basketball games live but you’ll be able to find most, if not all, of the Illini’s regular season and tournament games. In many cases you’ll have the option of selecting streams of various bandwidth to best work with your personal computer and Internet setup.
After locating a stream to watch Illinois basketball online free you can watch it on your computer or on a tablet or smartphone. One of the best ways to watch live sports stream is via a streaming box (Roku, Google Chromecast, Apple TV) which transfers the live stream on to your television. This way you aren’t dependent on what the TV networks want you to see and instead you have the freedom to select the games and sports you’re interested in from anywhere in the world.