Illinois Basketball: 2023 star JJ Taylor talks Illini in recruiting interview
On August 15, 2020, Illinois basketball was the first team to extend a scholarship offer to in-state superstar, Javonte “JJ” Taylor.
Since that day, the Illini target has started to receive a massive amount of recruiting attention. He has now roughly 16 scholarship offers and they are all from high-level DI programs. All of the best teams in the nation want Taylor to play for their program because he is one of the best players in the country.
Taylor is a 6-foot-8, 185-pound small forward from Kenwood Academy and resides in Chicago, Illinois. He is rated as a five-star recruit and ranked as the No. 7 player in the class of 2023. He is also the No. 2 small forward in the nation and the best player coming out of the state of Illinois.
In a recent recruiting video by Scott Burgess of Prep Hoops, Taylor talks about his recruitment and mentions some of the hot names such as Kentucky, Duke, Gonzaga and Michigan. He then goes on to mention Illinois.
“Ain’t nothing like home. It’s Illinois, so I’ll always have that as one of my options for sure,” said Taylor.
Illinois basketball seems to be in the mix after watching the recruiting video.
I know some people might watch that video and see Taylor talk about a few other programs more glowingly right now. He also drops the words, “dream schools.” That is always something to make you nervous if you aren’t mentioned in that mix.
But what I took away from the recruiting video is that Taylor is nowhere near making a decision. He mentions so many programs that he likes, and then at the end of the video, he says there are a lot of schools after him right now.
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Brad Underwood and his coaching staff need to put constant recruiting resources into Taylor. As we all know, the former Illini coaching staff – now with Kentucky and Gonzaga – were pretty good at recruiting the Chicago area. Snagging a player like Taylor would show that the new coaching staff and Underwood can recruit and what type of pull the program has in its current state.