{"id":204885,"date":"2025-10-06T11:23:05","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T11:23:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/204885\/"},"modified":"2025-10-06T11:23:05","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T11:23:05","slug":"good-morning-illini-nation-playing-to-their-strengths-sports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/204885\/","title":{"rendered":"Good Morning, Illini Nation: Playing to their strengths | Sports"},"content":{"rendered":"

To subscribe, click here<\/a><\/p>\n

Sign up for our daily basketball newsletter here<\/a><\/p>\n

Welcome to \u201cGood Morning, Illini Nation,\u201d your daily dose of college basketball news from Illini beat writer and AP Top 25 voter Scott Richey. He\u2019ll offer up insights every morning on Brad Underwood\u2019s team and college basketball at large:<\/p>\n

Brad Underwood had to know when he recruited Zvonimir Ivisic out of the transfer portal from Arkansas (following a one-year stop at Kentucky) that he’d face persistent questions about just how he could use the 7-foot-2 big man next to … his twin brother, 7-1 Illinois center Tomislav Ivisic.<\/p>\n

It’s too good of a story not to generate interest. A pair of 7-footers. Twins no less (even if they aren’t identical). That they have similar enough skill sets to fit the five-out offensive style Underwood has opted as his top choice \u2014 but varied enough they’re not fully overlapping in ability \u2014 means he could play them together.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It’s a notion too good to resist. Putting 14 combined feet of Croatians on the court together is quite the notion. Particularly if the Ivisic twins are in a jumbo package of Balkans with 6-9 forward David Mirkovic, 6-7 guard Andrej Stojakovic and (not quite as big) 6-3 guard Mihailo Petrovic.<\/p>\n

That doesn’t mean Illinois fans should expect 40 minutes of Ivisic twins together on the court every game.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“I’m very much into playing into their strengths and not trying to say, ‘Well, they’ve got a size advantage, let’s post them,’ if that’s not what their strengths are,” Underwood said. “I think Zvonimir is an outstanding shooter. He’s got a gift. He’s 7-2 and can shoot it over the top of most everybody he plays against, and he gets it off very quickly. He’s very good shooting off the move. He does that a really high clip where Tomi is more a pick-and-pop, open up and doesn’t do it as well on the move.<\/p>\n

“We’ll play to their strengths, and we’ll see what that looks like. But we’re sure not going to put them in situations to not be successful on either end of the court. I think both of them are figuring out the defensive side of it more than the offensive side of it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To subscribe, click here Sign up for our daily basketball newsletter here Welcome to \u201cGood Morning, Illini Nation,\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":204886,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[402,4690,398,400,401,99],"class_list":["post-204885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-basketball","tag-basketball","tag-illini-sports","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-basketball","tag-ncaabasketball","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204885\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/204886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}