Basketball
Study ranks Illinois as the 4th-best basketball state. Here’s why it could be higher
A recent study named Illinois the fourth-best basketball state in the United States.
NBA experts at Fadeaway World created its rankings using a formula that considered the birthplaces of NBA and WNBA players and Hall of Famers, the number of NBA, WNBA, G League and NCAA Division I teams, and the number of NBA, WNBA, NCAA champions in each state.
Illinois does well with any paint-by-the-numbers formula you use. It has produced 300 NBA players, trailing only California and New York. It was sixth in most NBA players per capita and fourth in most NBA Hall of Famers. Chicago, with 155 NBA players, easily leads all cities in producing the most NBA talent. Illinois has 13 NCAA Division I basketball schools, tied for seventh and one shy of fifth place.
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High schools were not part of the formula. If they were, people from the state say Illinois would have ranked even higher.
“The history of the sport in our state is unparalleled,” said Kurt Gibson, who oversaw basketball for the Illinois High School Association for years before moving to a part-time role on June 29. “There are so many stories, great rivalries, players and coaches that have made Illinois high school basketball second to none. It’s America’s original March Madness. That alone speaks to why Illinois is the best state in the country when it comes to high school basketball.”
As the IHSA reminds people every spring, March Madness was first coined to describe the Illinois state tournament in 1939 — while the NCAA didn’t start using that tag until broadcaster Brent Musberger kept using it during the 1982 NCAA tournament.
But almost no one seems to know that Illinois also had the first state basketball tournament in the nation. Before Illinois began its tournament in 1908, track was the only sport any state had a state competition in.
“It’s incredibly cool,” Gibson said. “It just shows how fortunate we are that the people running IHSA schools in its early years had the foresight to say we want to recognize a state champion and we are going to organize a state-wide competition. Those kinds of things were not in place anywhere else.”
How far ahead of the curve was Illinois, especially for a large state? Well, California didn’t hold its first state basketball tournament until 1981 and New York was only two years earlier in 1979.
For almost 100 years, Illinois was also the hardest state to win a state title in. Until it split into Class A and AA in 1972, Illinois had the most schools in any one-class state tournament. And even in the two-class system for the next 35 years, Illinois, with around 760 basketball-playing schools, had more than double the number of Kentucky and Indiana, the largest one-class states at the time. Even with four classes since 2008, Illinois ranks near the top in schools per class, with larger states such as California, New York and Texas splitting into six classes and Florida boasting seven classes.
“It’s a pretty neat thing for the state to be able to say we had the original tournament,” said Rockford East coach Roy Sackmaster, who led the E-Rabs to a fourth-place finish in Class 4A in 2019 and also played at state during his student days at Rockford Boylan. “In my opinion, it’s still the best tournament in the country. I grew up in the two-class system, which seemed the best system ever. But few other states have less than four classes, so we are still maybe the hardest state to win a title in.”
Marcus Griffin, a key figure in one of Illinois’ most famous basketball dynasties, said another reason to rank Illinois higher is that it is one of the few states that can claim basketball is bigger than football inside its borders. Football is king in America, with the NFL bringing in as much revenue as the NBA and MLB combined. Nielsen reported that 93 of the top 100 most-watched TV shows in 2023 were NFL games.
“As big as basketball is in the South, everybody knows football is bigger. It’s not even close,” said Griffin, the star center for a Peoria Manual team that won a record four consecutive state titles from 1994-97. “Football down there is at a different level. You come up here in Illinois, it’s basketball.
“Their winter is probably 50 degrees. They can be out there playing football all year round. Here, for six months, you can’t even be outside, but you can play basketball all year long.”
And while Illinois players don’t always lead Illinois colleges deep into the NCAA tournament, they often spearhead out-of-state teams. When Wichita State became the first school to ever start 35-0, the Shockers’ best player was Rockford Auburn grad Fred VanVleet. Lincolnshire Stevenson grad Jalen Brunson led Villanova to two recent NCAA titles. Both are now NBA All-Stars.
“Every time I turn on the NCAA tournament you see someone from Illinois that seems to be on all of those teams,” said Eric Kudronowicz, who coached tiny Scales Mound (70 students) to the Class 1A state finals in 2023 and semifinals the year before. “And it’s not just on the Division I level, it’s also on the Division II and Division III level.”
Other Illinois claims include producing the first dominant NBA player in George Mikan, a Joliet native who starred at DePaul, Michael Jordan becoming the greatest NBA player of all-time with the Chicago Bulls and Adolph Rupp, for decades the NCAA’s winningest coach, getting his start at Freeport High School before becoming the head coach at Kentucky. And also being a hotbed for some of the greatest women players in history. Tamika Catchings and Candace Parker are both rated top-10 WNBA players of all time. Forty former Illinois girls high school players were drafted by the WNBA between 1997 and 2020.
“Illinois basketball,” Kudronowicz said, “has that lineage of the original March Madness and then having stories decade after decade of great teams around the state, great coaches and great players.”
Griffin, who also started for an Illini team that won the Big Ten and finished the season ranked No. 4 in the nation, lived Illinois’ love for basketball. Those days he said it was too cold to go outside? Well, if that was the only way he was going to play basketball, he found a way to get outside.
“I used to have gloves and socks on in three feet of snow playing basketball,” Griffin said. “Illinois is just a basketball state. That will never change.”
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