Jul. 6—CHAMPAIGN — Brad Underwood has to take a minute and think about his favorite Terrence Shannon Jr. moment from the 2023-24 season.
It’s not an unreasonable pause by the Illinois men’s basketball coach. Not with Shannon having put together arguably the best single season in program history.
Underwood ultimately came up with three.
First was Shannon’s 33-point game at Madison Square Garden — “an electric night” made better because of the stage and the fact Marcus Domask also scored 33 points in the Illini’s Jimmy V Classic 98-89 win against Florida Atlantic last December in New York.
Shannon’s 40-point game against Nebraska this past March during the Big Ten tournament at the Target Center in Minneapolis was next.
And not only because he set a new Big Ten tournament record during the Illini’s come-from-behind 98-87 win in the semifinals. Holding the Cornhuskers’ Keisei Tominaga to 18 points on 18 shots a month after he dropped 31 in Champaign earlier this past season at State Farm Center was worth a mention, too.
But Underwood’s favorite Shannon moment? It had nothing to do with a scoring outburst or a dagger three-pointer.
It was Shannon diving on the floor multiple times to secure a loose ball in the first round of the NCAA tournament against Morehead State when the Illini needed it the most.
A hustle play early in the second half that changed the tenor and tone of that game at CHI Health Center in Omaha, Neb., helping the Illini turn a close lead into an eventual 85-69 win.
“That’s your first-round draft pick,” Underwood told The News-Gazette this week. “That’s your 27th player taken in the NBA draft. That’s your best player in the history of Illinois basketball in a single season, doing that for a group of guys that weren’t all on the court, but on the bench, so they could win.”
Illinois did a lot of winning in the 2023-24 season and wouldn’t have done so — at least not to the level accomplished — without Shannon. The 6-foot-6, 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’s 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 about Shannon piecing together the best season of his career. “His confidence was through the roof because of his comfort with what we were doing. I think his teammates allowed him to be comfortable. … The game becomes easier when you have that and when you work as hard as he did at things that weren’t as great the year before.”
Shannon returned to Illinois for the 2023-24 season because of the feedback he got going through the pre-draft process last summer. A major point of emphasis was three-point shooting. Knocking down 32 percent of his three-pointers in his first season with the Illini wasn’t good enough. One more season in Champaign, shooting at a 36 percent clip from deep, helped turn the left-handed shooting Shannon into a first-round pick last month to jumpstart his NBA career with the Minnesota Timberwolves.
That’s an NBA career that was potentially in doubt through most of Shannon’s final season in Champaign. Arrested in December on a rape charge in Lawrence, Kan., Shannon had to sue the university to have his automatic suspension overturned and get back on the court. Had a not guilty verdict not come down by June 13, there’s no telling what would have happened June 26-27 at the draft.
It simply made what Shannon accomplished this past season — particularly in hostile Big Ten arenas on the road — even more remarkable. Sure, his 736 points will sit atop the Illini record books for who knows how long. But his perseverance is what his former college coach will remember.
“Doing this 36 years, going on 37, not many players I’ve coached would have been able to handle all of that in the manner he did, and then on top of it, 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 he was before. It didn’t happen right away, but very few people have the intestinal fortitude and the toughness and the grit and the desire.
“It could have been very easy for him to go the other way, and everybody would have understood, but what he did was at the end almost play better than he had at any point. He never let it become an excuse. He never let it become a reason for his teammates to doubt him or his teammates not trust him on the court. That’s remarkable.”
