Illinois Basketball's Best of the Century: No. 9 Frank Williams

Today marks another entry in our ongoing Illinois on SI "Best of the Century" series featuring the top 10 Illini players over the past 25 years. In our selection process, we considered individual production, career length (must have played at least two seasons since 2000), team accomplishments and intangibles.No. 10: Malcolm Hill

No. 9 Frank Williams (1999-2002)

Career averages: 14.3 points, 4.0 rebounds, 4.3 assists Best season averages (2015-16): 16.2 points, 4.7 rebounds, 4.4 assists

Illinois basketball was in transition in the early 2000s, turning the page from coach Lon Kruger's fringe Big Ten contenders and top-25 clubs to Bill Self's NCAA Tournament contenders – and Frank Williams was the connective tissue that gave the program the muscle to step up to a new level.

Kruger had tapped into a rich vein of Peoria talent, first luring Sergio McClain and Marcus Griffin to Champaign and, soon after, Williams. Griffin and Williams had both been High School All-Americans, but Williams' recruitment generated a bit more heat – and his signing with the Illini helped prove Griffin wasn't a fluke and that his class didn't have to be only a flash in the pan in Champaign.

Williams wound up making 29 starts and playing in all of Illinois' 32 games in the 1999-2000 season, back when freshman point guards were more the exception than the rule in college basketball lineups. He averaged 11.4 points, 3.4 rebounds, 4.1 assists and 2.3 steals as a freshman and, following a decade of irrelevance since the 1988-89 Flyin' Illini, began to push Illinois back onto the national scene.