After an Illinois basketball game, particularly after a win, I go to YouTube and see if I can find postgame interviews with the coach and some of the players of the opposing team. Yesterday, after the Purdue game, Braden Smith, who is/was considered the best point guard in the conference, referred to Keaton Wagler as a lottery pick. Wagler is a true freshman, will turn 19 next month, and was not highly regarded coming out of high school, although he was Player of the Year in Kansas.
There are perhaps many reasons for why Wagler was undervalued. One is that at 6 feet 6 inches, he was very skinny, weighing only 160 pounds, and with that there was the issue of whether he could withstand the rough play he'd face in college. Another is that he didn't play in one of the prestigious summer leagues, where scouts for college teams better get to evaluate talent via head to head competition. I don't know why he missed this opportunity, but one wonders if other very talented players also might miss it, for whatever reason, and then most of the scouts lack the further reach to evaluate the player in a reasonable way. If so, are there others like Wagler who might be discovered in the future.
Still another possibility is that even after coming to Illinois and achieving a good deal of recognition, Wagler nonetheless remained undervalued. Basketball is a team sport and each player needs to fit in with the team. Further, upperclassman who are starters tend to be given more responsibility than first-year players. There is an unofficial seniority system, if you will. But recently Wagler had taken over the ball handling responsibilities, so that Kylan Boswell (a senior) could concentrate on other aspects of his game. And with Boswell subsequently fracturing his hand and then unable to play, Wagler's responsibilities to the team rose even more.
I confess that before yesterday's game I had assumed that Mihailo Petrović, another point guard from the Balkans, older and experienced in international play, would take up much of the slack in Boswell's absence. Petrović had been injured during the summer and consequently missed the preseason practice. So, he's been in catch up mode since then. While he's gotten a few minutes of playing time in games recently, he seemed somewhat out of control, making turnovers too often. He has looked better in the prior game or two, so my assumption seem warranted. But it didn't happen. Jake Davis, who really is a forward, took the slot that Boswell held. This put even more responsibility on Wagler.
When I was a campus administrator, I came up with the expression - anyone can be a hero in a sprint, nobody can be a hero in a marathon. We're not quite halfway through the Big Ten season yet. Wagler played 39 (out of 40) minutes against Purdue. The games themselves are incredibly physical, as are the practices, though we only know about the latter by what the players report. Further, the travel can be draining. And with the Big Ten now with teams on both the East and West Coasts, some of the travel is well beyond what it used to be, when the conference had fewer teams. The Purdue players were asked about this in their postgame interview, having lost their previous game at UCLA. Braden Smith, in his response, said it was unfair to the West Coast teams, as this burden is much greater for them. Illinois has yet to make its West Coast swing. What impact will that have when it does happen? The question here is whether Wagler's stellar performance will continue for the remainder of the games or if he'll come back down to earth, out of fatigue, perhaps due to minor injury, or that much of the novelty has turned into a grind. We'll see.
Ever since the book, Moneyball, came out in 2003, it has become an object of fascination about how very good athletes might be identified, especially when the competition misses them because it is focused on other characteristics of players while recruiting. The hero of Moneyball is Billy Beane, then the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics, a small market team which means a smaller payroll than other teams. He needed to find good players who wouldn't cost an arm and a leg. The A's had reasonably good teams back then. Eventually the rest of Major League Baseball caught on and changed the metrics they relied on to evaluate younger talent. More recently, for some teams signing Free Agents became a preferred substitute to developing their own talent. Likewise, in College Basketball there now is the Portal, and developing players as Freshmen can be risky because those players might very well enter the Portal the following year.
But it is more than just identifying talent. Player development matters a great deal. In some sense, Wagler is similar to Will Riley, a star on the team last year, who though a forward liked to handle the ball and was very effective as an offensive player. Riley is a couple of inches taller than Wagler and is even skinnier than him. It makes you wonder whether Illinois has a comparative advantage in player development of this sort. Zvonimir Ivisic, the twin brother of Tomislav Ivisic, came to Illinois through the portal after a year at Kentucky and then a year at Arkansas. Big Z also was skinny, when considered for playing center, and had an issue that one of his legs was much weaker than the other. Big Z's issues have been rectified at Illinois, to some extent. The credit goes to Adam Fletcher, the Strength and Conditioning Coach. I don't get why Kentucky didn't have someone similar to Fletcher or why some other program with lots of money doesn't bid him away. But given that Illinois seems to excel in this area, perhaps it has a true advantage in recruiting talented but skinny players, and maybe that offers some solace for Illini fans if Wagler does turn pro at the end of this season, as seems likely.
There is also the general issue of a college student maturing, much of which involves developing new friends beyond high school, and developing new interests that are related to those friendships. The team has a cohort of players from the Balkans and it must be, in part, that they develop friendships with each other as a consequence. Plus the Ivisic twins off the court seem particularly impish, which should help others on the team relax socially. But Wagler, who is from Kansas, may have no other friends outside of the basketball team. and as stoic as he seems in postgame interviews, as well as in his on-the-court demeanor, surely he needs to be able to open up with a trusted friend about his emotions and his thinking. If he has that at Illinois, will he feel confident that he can find it again, while playing professional basketball someplace else?
And there is the matter of managing one's ego. Dylan Harper, who was drafted #2 in the 2025 NBA Draft as the highest drafted guard, is averaging 20.5 minutes/game and 10.4 points/game. He looks to be mainly coming off the bench. When he was at Rutgers, he was the backbone of the team. The difference between his current salary and what he was getting in NIL money has to serve as compensation. But there is another way to think of ego, as providing a very strong motivation for getting better as a player. If Wagler anticipated that even as a lottery pick he'd be coming off the bench with whatever team drafted him, and wanted to prepare himself to be a starter two or three years hence, he'd ask where his opportunities for development would be greater as well as what aspects of his current makeup need the most improvement. I can imagine Wagler having a call with Will Riley, maybe several such calls, where they use Riley's recent experience to forecast what will happen for Wagler and what should happen. But can such a conversation happen? Do freshmen who then get drafted stay in touch with their college teams after they make it to the NBA? If not, who would facilitate this imagined conversation?
As a selfish fan, I prefer the path where the star player stays in college another year to be the recommendation in such a conversation. Yet because I'm evidently biased this way, I wouldn't want to make any predictions about Wagler's career beyond this year. The game against Washington on Thursday marks the halfway point in the Big Ten season. The game after that, a rematch with Nebraska, will be a good way to benchmark where Illinois is as a team and where Wagler is as a player. No doubt, I'll be watching.
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