Best Illinois basketball players: All-time Illini starting lineup

There are only five spots open on the all-time Illinois basketball starting lineup, so w which of the best Illinois basketball players were lucky to make the cut?

Brad Underwood seemed to breathe new life into Illinois basketball in the 2019-20 season before the year was cut short prior to the NCAA Tournament. The head coach is on a mission to get the Fighting Illini back to their former glory and, while that’s not an easy task considering the mess that was made at times, he’s clearly on track. It wouldn’t hurt for him to bring some all-time greats into the fold, though.

When you look at the most successful Illinois basketball runs of the modern era, the two that clearly jumps out are the late-1980s/early-1990s and then the early 2000s. Not coincidentally, those happen to be when the Fighting Illini made their two most recent trips to the Final Four, including their only national runner-up showing in 2005.

And when you look at those teams, they are littered with some of the biggest names to ever pass through Champaign and put on the orange and navy of the Fighting Illini. But if you were to look back over the entire history of the program, how many of the players from those teams would make an all-time Illinois basketball starting five?

In truth, the answer is quite a few — but those two eras don’t hold every spot on the Illinois all-time starting lineup. Those five spots are reserved for the best of the best at their position, which means there were some tough omissions.

There were several Illinois basketball greats that didn’t make the cut — be it due to position or otherwise — that deserve an honorable mention: Deron Williams, Bruce Douglas, Kendall Gill, Kenny Battle, Kiwane Garris, Dave Downey, Derek Harper, James Augustine and Don Freeman all deserve mentions for their contributions to the Fighting Illini.

But now, let’s get into the all-time starting five, ranked in descending order and starting at the power forward spot.