Illinois Year in Review | Male Athlete of the Year Terrence Shannon Jr.

July 6 – CAMPAIGN – Brad Underwood needs to take a minute and think about his favorite Terrence Shannon Jr. moment from the 2023-24 season.

It’s not an unreasonable break from the Illinois men’s basketball coach. Not with Shannon having put together arguably the best season in the program’s history.

Underwood eventually got to three.

The first was Shannon’s 33-point game at Madison Square Garden – “an electric night” made better by the stage and the fact that Marcus Domask also scored 33 points in the Illini Jimmy V Classic’s 98-89 win against the Florida Atlantic last December, in New York. .

Shannon’s 40-point game against Nebraska last March during the Big Ten Tournament at the Target Center in Minneapolis was next.

And not just because he set a new Big Ten tournament record during the Illini’s 98-87 victory in the semifinals. Also worth mentioning was the Cornhuskers’ Keisei Tominaga, with 18 points on 18 shots a month after dropping 31 in Champaign early last season at the State Farm Center.

But Underwood’s favorite Shannon moment? It had nothing to do with a scoring explosion or a three-point dagger.

It was Shannon diving to the ground multiple times to secure a loose ball in the first round of the NCAA tournament against Morehead State when the Illini needed it most.

A wild play early in the second half that changed the tenor and tone of that game at the CHI Health Center in Omaha, Nebraska, helping the Illini turn a narrow lead into an eventual 85-69 victory.

“That’s his first-round pick,” Underwood told The News-Gazette this week. “This is his 27th player selected in the NBA draft. That’s your best player in Illinois basketball history in a single season, doing it for a group of guys who weren’t all on the court, but on the bench, so they could win.”

Illinois has won many victories in the 2023-24 season and would not have done so – at least not at the level achieved – without Shannon. The 6-foot-2, 225-pound guard was a dominant offensive force, a frustrating defender (if you were an opposing guard) and an easy pick as The News-Gazette Illinois Male Athlete of the Year for the 2023-24 school year . .

“I think it was a culmination of a lot of things,” Underwood said of Shannon putting together the best season of his career. “Her confidence was through the roof because of her comfort with what we were doing. I think his teammates allowed him to feel comfortable. They weren’t as good the year before.”

Shannon returned to Illinois for the 2023-24 season because of the feedback he received during the pre-draft process last summer. A major point of emphasis was the three-point shot. Hitting 32 percent of his three-point shots in his first season with the Illini wasn’t enough. Another season in Champaign, shooting 36 percent from deep, helped turn the left-handed Shannon into a first-round pick last month to boost his NBA career with the Minnesota Timberwolves.

That’s an NBA career that was potentially in doubt for most of Shannon’s final season in Champaign. Arrested in December on rape charges in Lawrence, Kansas, Shannon had to sue the university to get his automatic suspension overturned and back in court. If the not guilty verdict had not been released by June 13, there is no telling what would have happened June 26-27 in the draft.

It simply made what Shannon accomplished last season — especially in the hostile Big Ten arenas on the road — all the more remarkable. Of course, his 736 points will stay at the top of the Illini record books for who knows how long. But his perseverance is what his former college coach will remember.

“Doing this for 36 years, going on 37, not many players I’ve coached would be able to handle it all the way he did and, on top of that, perform at the level he did,” Underwood said. “Even when he came back, very few people would have persevered enough to perform and get back to the level they were at before. It didn’t happen right away, but very few people have the intestinal fortitude and the stamina and the courage and the desire.

“It could have been very easy for him to go the other way, and everyone would have understood, but what he did was almost play better than he ever had. He never let that become an excuse. He never let it become a reason for his teammates to doubt him or for his teammates to not trust him on the court. That’s remarkable.