David Mirkovic is starting to look like the kind of player Illinois basketball doesn’t get every year - or even every decade. And if the preseason chatter keeps building the way it has, he could land in a club the program has only visited a handful of times.
That’s where the conversation has gone after 247Sports’ podcast, The Assist, released its preseason All-American team on Wednesday and included Mirkovic alongside Jeremy Fears Jr., Tyler Tanner, Thomas Haugh and Tyran Stokes. For Illinois, that kind of recognition would be rare territory. In the last 40 years, only Frank Williams in 2001-02, Dee Brown in 2005-06, Ayo Dosunmu in 2020-21 and Kofi Cockburn in 2021-22 have earned preseason All-American honors.
Mirkovic’s freshman season is the reason this is even a conversation. The 6-foot-9 forward put up 13.3 points, 8.0 rebounds and 2.6 assists per game, while shooting 37.5% from three-point range on 4.1 attempts per game.
He also showed the kind of versatility that lets him move across every position on the floor. If not for Keaton Wagler’s strong first year, Mirkovic would have drawn even more attention.
There’s also a strong belief, at least from this angle, that Mirkovic has a real shot at the John R. Wooden Award and can be viewed as a mini version of Nikola Jokic. But the analytics crowd is not quite as sold on him being among the game’s absolute top tier just yet.
EvanMiya.com currently has Mirkovic at No. 12 overall with a Bayesian Performance Rating of 8.63. That number combines offensive and defensive BPR metrics, and it’s solid enough to place him near the top of the national conversation without putting him quite in the top five.
Of the other players on The Assist list, Fears is ranked No. 1, Tanner No.
2, Haugh No. 6 and Stokes No. 32, though there’s skepticism about how to measure a true freshman before he’s played a game.
Illinois, as a team, is being talked about like one of the best in the country and a legitimate title contender. The question now is whether Mirkovic can push that preseason buzz all the way into AP All-American status. If he does, it would add another rare name to a very short Illinois list.
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