Huge hire for the Illinois basketball team should help recruiting and transfer portal

The Illinois basketball team added to the program on Sunday, and it wasn’t from the transfer portal.

Usually, these articles are about a player departing, entering, or the Illini showing interest in the athlete. That isn’t the case this time, though. Illinois is doing some great work this offseason, but this time around, it is on the coaching staff.

In the last couple of weeks, the Illini lost assistant coach and former player Chester Frazier to West Virginia. He has since landed Illinois transfer Amani Hansberry, but Brad Underwood went to work finding Frazier’s replacement.

On Sunday, that replacement was finally found. After about a week of speculation, the Illinois men’s basketball social media account announced that Orlando Antigua would be coming back to Champaign.

Antigua was a great basketball player coming up through the high school ranks. He was a Parade and McDonald’s All-American for St. Raymond’s High School. He took those talents to Pittsburgh to play for the Panthers in college.

After his college days, Antigua joined the Harlem Globetrotters. His coaching career started in 2003 with Pittsburgh. He then coached at Memphis. He then earned his first head coach job with South Florida.

Antiqua joined the Illinois basketball coaching staff in 2017 as an assistant coach. He coached the program through the 2020-21 campaign before jumping over to Kentucky. Now that John Calipari has left the Wildcats, Angtigua could have followed him but decided Champaign was the place to be.

Illinois basketball is about to get another boost when it comes to recruiting and the transfer portal

The Illini were in a bad place when Underwood took over the program. We hadn’t made the NCAA tournament the four seasons prior, and this was nearly a complete rebuild.

Piece by piece, the team started to come together. Antigua helped in this process. Illinois landed Ayo Dosunmu, and then Antigua was a big part of bringing in Kofi Cockburn. This duo got the Illini back to prominence.

I look for Antigua to bring in and develop great talent at Illinois once again. He is known to be an ace recruiter, and now that he is back in the fold, I believe the sky is the limit. The coming years should be quite fun for Illinois basketball fans.