CHAMPAIGN — When David Mirković works out individually against the Illinois student managers at the Ubben Basketball Complex, the antics come out.
A basketball thrown across the gym. A refusal to speak to a manager for a couple of days because of what happened on the court. A whole lot of trash talk — in English now.
One story goes that as the freshman forward from Montenegro was preparing to shoot free throws, he looked at a manager — dead serious — and said that while the manager was drinking beers the night before, he was in his room, mentally preparing with Chinese monks. Mirković went on to destroy his practice partners that day.
Assistant coach Zach Hamer, Illinois’ director of player development, said when he is officiating and Mirković doesn’t love a call, the gym fills with the energy of the moment. It’s all in good fun, but Mirković reins it in a little during full-team practices, knowing he has to refine his control for games.
“In practice it’s more him just giving me an incredulous look that I didn’t call a foul, which I think some Big Ten officials might be able to relate to at this point,” Hamer said.
Much attention rightfully has been given to the surprising freshman season of Illinois guard Keaton Wagler, whose teammates called him cold as he calmly knocked down shot after shot in the regular season to become the Big Ten Freshman of the Year.
If Wagler is ice, then Mirković — Illinois’ other breakout freshman — is fire.
The 6-foot-9, 250-pound forward, whom coaches called jovial and spirited, motors through games, his hair wild and his feelings written all over his face. He once called himself Dennis Rodman to coaches for taking on the challenge of slowing Big Ten scoring leader Nick Martinelli. After Illinois upset then-No. 4 Purdue behind Wagler’s 46 points, Mirković said in his postgame interview that he threw chairs and screamed for seven minutes straight in celebration.
But underneath the big personality is a high basketball IQ, skill and physicality built from a life of training — first with his mother and then away from home, starting at age 14, on the way to playing for the Montenegrin club SC Derby.
The Illini have embraced the full package as they head into the Big Ten Tournament quarterfinals Friday at the United Center as the No. 4 seed and then next week’s NCAA Tournament.
Mirković emerged to put up 13.2 points, 7.8 rebounds and 2.5 assists per game and be named to the Big Ten’s all-freshman team. He has scored in double figures in 13 of Illinois’ last 14 games, including 25 plus seven rebounds against Indiana on Feb. 15 and 22 plus 11 rebounds against Maryland in the regular-season finale Sunday.
Coach Brad Underwood said earlier this season that “we can’t win without Mirk.” And Mirk is intense about helping the Illini win.
“That’s what makes him great to an extent is that passion and that fire,” Hamer said. “It fuels him. Sometimes when he tries to curb that, his focus goes to that instead of just focusing on what’s in front of him on the floor.
“It’s a work in progress, and he knows it. He has a way of getting the best out of himself through his passion.”
Tough teacher
Associate head coach Orlando Antigua said Mirković often has a response ready when Illinois coaches give him critiques.
“You can say all the mean stuff. That’s nothing what you say, compared to my mom,” he tells them.
Jelena Mirković (maiden name Knežević), a 6-foot-3 forward, played basketball professionally in Serbia, France and Italy and played in three European championships for the Yugoslavian national team in the late 1990s.
Mirković’s father, Zoran, was a teacher and didn’t play basketball. Neither did his sister, Sara, who is 13 years older. So it was David versus Jelena on the court, starting on a plastic hoop in their living room in Nikšić, Montenegro.
David already had the competitiveness then.
“She would beat me, and I would like cry and beg her to play again,” Mirković said. “I just put a lot of emotion in all that. It really means to me a lot.”
Mirković tried other sports — boxing, judo, tennis, soccer — but his parents pushed him toward basketball because he was tall — and had the DNA for it. Jelena was his most influential teacher, but she could be tough in pushing her son to work harder and be stronger and more confident.
“She recognized that I was getting better after she was strict and hard on me,” Mirković said. “That’s just the old-fashioned Balkan style of teaching everything. And, I mean, it worked.”
Antigua is sure it was formative to Mirković’s basketball identity.
“When you have that kind of background and that kind of motivation and that kind of teaching instilled in you at an early age, it’s no wonder why he’s had success,” Antigua said.
Mirković moved to Podgorica, about 40 minutes from his hometown, when he was 14 to pursue basketball. His parents visited twice a week and he went home on weekends off, but he learned how to live on his own — little things like taking out the trash and cleaning.
That’s where he began to take basketball really seriously and where he spent a season or two as a point guard, helping to develop the ball-handling and passing skills that have aided him at Illinois. He played with the SC Derby under-19 team and then two seasons for their professional first team in the Adriatic Basketball Association League, in which he was among the youngest players.
He averaged 8.6 points, 6.4 rebounds and 1.3 assists in his final season in 2024-25.
“That’s one of the best leagues in Europe that has a lot of former NBA and NCAA players, and just that experience playing with much stronger, much more experienced players meant for me a lot,” Mirković said. “It was a little easier for me to adjust when I came here, when I came back to play for college with people my age.”
While with SC Derby, Mirković played with a Croatian center named Tomislav Ivišić, who followed his twin brother Zvonimir to the United States to play college basketball in the 2024-25 season.
Mirković’s relationship with Tomislav was key in the forward landing in Champaign over the summer to become part of Illinois’ Balkan Five, a quintet of players with Balkan heritage.
International connections
When Antigua asked the Ivišić twins about Mirković, they told him he was a great kid and a hard worker and had an unbelievable motor.
“And that he was an acquired taste,” Antigua said with a laugh.
Illinois has been recruiting internationally for years, including bringing in Tomislav Ivišić, Lithuanian guard Kasparas Jakučionis and Canadian forward Will Riley last season, and the coaches found out about Mirković through their overseas contacts.
They watched film of when he was younger playing with Ivišić and liked his physicality and versatility. When they dug deeper, they found out about his point guard background.
“So he can handle the ball, and his shot was consistent,” Antigua said. “Wasn’t very athletic, but long arms and really tough and just liked to compete.
“And then we start talking to him. He’s got this personality about him that is endearing and we loved, and we heard how good of a kid he was, how good of a teammate he was.”
Mirković, who twice traveled to the United States for international youth basketball events, watched Ivišić at Illinois last season from Montenegro and talked to him often about life in Champaign. He heard good things about the facilities and the coaches. When Illinois offered him a scholarship, Mirković didn’t look any further.
Antigua and assistant coach Tyler Underwood went to see Mirković play in an ABA League game between SC Derby and Mega Superbet in April. Current Illini reserve point guard Mihailo Petrović hit the winning shot for Mega.
Mirković was playing through a painful groin injury that had kept him out of practice for two days. But he wanted to gut through the game in front of his future coaches.
“He was trying to will his team, do everything he could,” Antigua said. “He was defending, was rebounding, was bringing the ball up, was passing the ball, and it was fun to see him. He was at like 65%, 70%, we thought. You could still just see how talented he was.”
It wasn’t the last time the Illinois coaches saw him push through pain. He has played through the flu and a twisted ankle this season, the latter in the 88-82 win at Purdue. Among several viral comments after that game, Mirković said, “If we lost today and I wasn’t playing, I would kill myself probably.”
It didn’t come across the way he meant it to in his second language.
“I didn’t want people to understand it that way,” he said. “I didn’t mean it, obviously. But people understood my passion from that.”
Mirković was late to bringing that passion to Champaign because of the visa process. He missed all but three summer workouts but he still picked up on Illinois’ concepts right away.
When his teammates went home for a break in August, he stayed, working individually with coaches to get a grasp on their style of play. His creativity and confidence began to shine, Hamer said.
“When they came back, I was prepared,” Mirković said. “Like I didn’t miss a single day of summer.”
But there remained adjustments ahead.
‘Obsessive’ about improving
Mirković pointed to a treadmill in the corner of the Ubben men’s gym.
“David’s Treadmill,” the Illini called it in the fall. He had a fouling problem in his early practices with Illinois, and the treadmill was a frequent consequence of his mistakes.
While becoming fluent in English has been the biggest challenge for Mirković in his move to the United States, Illinois’ practices had a different challenge. He had to get used to the running.
When he was younger, he said, he would see older players skip drills if they didn’t feel like practicing. Not in Champaign. The increased focus on strength and conditioning helped him drop 20 pounds since his arrival.
“I never had these hard practices as we did in the preparation in the summer, August, September,” Mirković said. “We would just run. If you lose every competition or game, you don’t stop running the whole practice and you can’t sit. You’ve got to get out of your comfort zone every day.”
Hamer said Mirković wasn’t lazy at all when he arrived, but he needed to learn how to work smarter, not harder. He could shoot 1,000 shots and make 1,000 but couldn’t tell coaches what he worked on while shooting them.
“There wasn’t that intention to his work,” Hamer said. “Over the past few months, he has really grown in terms of his intentionality, in his work, in his process, in his recovery. Everything he is doing has intention. For him to improve on the reads he needs to be making, on shooting the types of shots he needs to make.
“We call it repetition without repetition. Getting in situations that are somewhat game-like and reacting to how he’s being guarded and defended and being able to take what the game gives him has been where he has really improved.”
Hamer said Mirković — “hard-headed” as he might be sometimes — takes the coaching because he is “obsessive” about improving and ultimately winning.
Mirković also has zeroed in on the mental side of his game, including his reactions to calls and non-calls. The arguments with managers and coaches might be amusing in workouts, but Mirković knows he can’t lose focus in games.
“I shouldn’t let referees affect my game,” he said.
He and Hamer have talked about relaxation techniques in the moment, and Hamer said it helps just to remind Mirković that officials are human beings.
“The one thing about David is he is such a kind and sensitive individual,” Hamer said. “And humanizing the officials for him has strengthened those bonds and strengthened his ability to respect the work that they’re doing and have those conversations that, ‘Hey, we’re working together.’ To become the best version of himself.”
The mental improvements are a work in progress. After Illinois’ 92-90 loss to Wisconsin on Feb. 10, Mirković sent Underwood a lengthy text, apologizing for not being at his best mentally.
He bounced back by turning in one of his best games of the season against Indiana, one of several good ones down the stretch.
“There’s a lot of people that believe in me, that support me, that give their best for me to be at my best level,” he said. “I think that game I wasn’t really at the game. I played bad. I think I (let) them down. I had to send him a message to say sorry. It was good motivation and discipline and teaching point for me.”
Yin and yang
The broadcast camera kept finding Mirković for reaction shots against pesky Maryland on Sunday.
After he made two spot-on passes to create baskets on back-to-back possessions late in the first half. After he flew in for an offensive rebound and then fought through three defenders for the putback to put the Illini up by three at the half. And then late in the game, after he took an inbounds pass and turned the corner around a Wagler pick for a layup and a 74-70 lead.
“His scoring has been up over the last 10 games, but this might be the most important game of Mirković’s season here today,” announcer Brandon Gaudin said.
Mirković helped carry the Illini to the win that secured them a triple bye into the Big Ten Tournament quarterfinals, and his play could be crucial as Illinois gets deeper into March.
Hamer said Mirković’s basketball IQ is his strongest attribute. He sees things faster than other players, like working with high-speed WiFi while others are on dial-up, Hamer said.
It shows up in his rebounding positioning, both offensively and defensively, and on the offensive end as a screener and playmaker. While Mirković still is growing on the defensive end, he helped fill the void as a ball-handler and facilitator on offense when veteran guard Kylan Boswell missed seven games with a fractured hand in January and February.
Boswell told reporters after the Maryland game that they keep trying to instill mental confidence in Mirković, telling him he’s one of the best bigs in the country.
“He’s a guy who’s a little bit undersized for his position and not a plus athlete for his position,” Hamer said, “and yet he’s our leading rebounder and one of the leading rebounders in the Big Ten because he has a knack for knowing where that ball is going to go and holding position.
“His IQ shows up on the offensive end as a screener and as a playmaker, creating advantages for his teammates. Keaton is obviously having an All-America-type season, and so much of that is owed to the screening of our frontcourt guys in David, Tomislav and Zvonimir. Those three guys are three of the best screeners in college basketball and know how to create advantages for our guards, and David is a huge part of that. His IQ and understanding of knowing where the ball needs to go and delivering on-time, on-target passes has been absolutely massive for us.”
Illinois coaches talk about the attention Mirković might be getting as a freshman if Wagler — averaging 17.9 points, 4.9 rebounds and 4.3 assists — wasn’t shocking the basketball world with his play.
But Mirković loves what’s happening for Wagler. He called him the best player he has played with and praised his understanding of the game, his patience and his skill. He thinks they are similar mentally as two of the Illinois’ youngest players (Mirković is 20 and Wagler 19).
Antigua thinks Wagler and Mirković — like yin and yang, he said — are so supportive of their teammates that they don’t care who’s getting more attention. In Illinois’ ideal world, both would turn heads in the weeks ahead.
Mirković has been pleasantly surprised with U.S. college life. He didn’t know college basketball fandom would be as intense as it is. He got to share it over the last couple of months, first with his parents, who visited for three weeks in January, and more recently with his sister, brother-in-law and niece. They toured the basketball facilities and State Farm Center and went to games.
The visits were “a refresh” for him after being away from home so long. He said his parents walked away impressed with the coaches and the environment.
Now Mirković is about to step into a new environment as tournament time arrives. Antigua thinks he and Wagler will handle it “the way they’ve handled everything else — they just go out and compete and hoop.”
And Mirković will bring his lively energy as he does it.
“It adds to the motor of our team,” Antigua said. “It adds to the toughness of our team. It adds to the will of our team. … It’s a lot of fun to coach.”
