Two weeks from today, the Illinois basketball team will play in an exhibition game against Illinois State.
I can’t believe the basketball season is already here. The Illini have quite the roster for 2025-26, and there are still some question marks remaining. The biggest issue right now is getting star European point guard Mihailo Petrovic eligible for the start of the season.
Once Illinois gets over that massive hurdle, the team should be off to the races. This team has a nice mix of returning talent and experienced newcomers. That is what excites most fans, but at the end of the day, we aren’t exactly sure the ceiling of this program.
There is one national pundit who is pretty high on the Illini, though. Evan Miyakawa of EvanMiya.com publishes a lot of great analytics on college basketball. Entering the 2025-26 campaign, he has Illinois as the No. 9 team in the country.
Here is the preseason top 25 at https://t.co/cegyfz96ax! pic.twitter.com/1waj8bpJsz
— Evan Miyakawa (@EvanMiya) September 29, 2025
Miyakawa breaks down his ranking by his calculations of offensive and defensive ratings. These two get combined to form a relative rating, which then determines where Illinois is ranked.
In the calculations, Illinois has a pretty balanced squad. Our offensive rating is 12.6, which ranks No. 10 in the country. The Illini’s defensive rating isn’t too far behind, as we check in with a 9.0 defensive rating, which is good enough to rank No. 15 in the nation.
Illinois basketball having a good defensive rating should make the rest of the country terrified
It isn’t a surprise that Illinois has a good offensive rating heading into the 2025-26 campaign. We are a team that averaged 83.6 points per game last season, which ranked No. 7 in the country. Defense is where we struggled the most.
The Illini had a hard time stopping teams defensively in 2024-25. We gave up 74.8 points per game, which ranked No. 238 out of 364 programs in DI basketball.
I believe a big reason for the increased belief in the Illinois defense is that we purged some of the bad defensive players from the roster. Dra Gibbs-Lawhorn had the worst defensive rating for the Illini, and he is now with UNLV. Will Riley was the third-worst on the team as well.
On top of some of the bad defensive talent departing, Brad Underwood added some nice pieces to help with defense. Zvonimir Ivisic enters the season with the best defensive rating on the team. Andrej Stojakovic is also a sound defender. I am excited to see how some of the European newcomers increase their prowess as the season unfolds, too.
Illinois basketball has a lot of talent for the upcoming campaign. Being a preseason top 10 team is a bit eye-opening. Maybe, just maybe, this team can get back to the NCAA tournament and reach the pinnacle of the game for the first time in program history.