Editor’s note: The Daily Illini sports desk sits down Sunday nights and decides which Illinois athlete or coach is our Illini of the Week. Student-athletes and coaches are evaluated by individual performance and contribution to team success.

Joseph Bertrand’s day was coming.

He had the tools all along, the stuff that would make coaches salivate. Bertrand was a two-time Illinois state dunk champion in high school with an uncanny knack for the hoop and long, sinewy arms. At 6-foot-5, he had the makings of a big guard that could present matchup problems at the collegiate level.

But when he landed at Illinois in 2009, the skinny kid with cornrows hair from Sterling High School wasn’t talked about much. The other members of his heralded recruiting class — D.J. Richardson, Brandon Paul and Tyler Griffey — played immediately as freshmen. Bertrand tore the lateral meniscus in his right knee. He had surgery in September and missed the whole season, redshirting to preserve all four years of his eligibility.

“Sitting out my freshman year was really hard on me,” Bertrand said.

Mired behind established rotations on a veteran team the next year, Bertrand again saw little playing time. It wasn’t until his sophomore year, in the Braggin’ Rights game against Missouri last December, that Bertand’s unique talent surfaced for the first time.

Facing an undefeated team that many analysts had pegged as a Final Four contender, Bertrand sparked a 17-3 second half run that gave Illinois the lead briefly. The athletic guard resuscitated an offense that had stalled at the end of the first half through an arsenal of floaters off dribble drives.

He finished the game perfect from the field on 9-for-9 shooting and a then career-high 19 points, despite losing to Missouri in the closing minutes of the game.

It seemed like a wunderkind performance that could ignite a promising collegiate career, but question marks riddled the effort. Bertrand had scored only two points in the previous six games before Missouri, and each floater from the sophomore during the Illini’s second-half run felt more preposterous than the last.

Even former head coach Bruce Weber was stunned, incredulously saying after the game, “Bertrand hadn’t made a bucket in weeks, even in practice.”

Weber ate his words quickly, handing Betrand his first career start nine days after the Missouri game. The offensive production wasn’t a fluke, either, as Bertrand scored his career-high 25 points against Nebraska in January.

But his scoring declined as the Big Ten season wore on with opponents’ sagging its defense and forcing Bertrand to shoot jump shots. The jumpers weren’t as successful as his trademark floaters, and Bertrand either shot them timidly or passed them up altogether.

Bertrand had not arrived yet.

With the coaching switch after last year came rumor that the new guy, John Groce, had an offense predicated on athletic guards forcing turnovers on defense and converting those turnovers into instant offense through transition.

Once Groce’s schemes were implemented, Bertrand’s teammates noticed his growing comfort within the system.

“It’s almost like it was built for Joe,” center Nnanna Egwu said before the season.

Bertrand always had his floater — “I can shoot that thing over anybody” — but a component of Groce’s offseason workouts seemed poised to help Bertrand the most: each player had to make 11,000 jump shots this summer.

The idea was to get the abundant Illini shooters to shoot with confidence once the season started. Bertrand never was considered in the “shooter” category in the past, and yet he found himself completing his 11,000 jump shots, too.

The results of Bertrand’s offseason work blended into a potent offensive mixture that enters the game off the bench to inject dynamic scoring option. Bertrand’s firepower was on full display last week in a win against Georgia Tech, which may signal his arrival for good on a surging Illinois team.

In a contentious, back-and-forth game, Bertrand scored 10 straight points for Illinois in a 1 minute, 38 second time span. The first bucket was a harmless layup. The second, a wide-open 3-pointer to give Illinois a one-point lead. Then, a pull-up 3-pointer from the top of the key with a defender in his face for a four-point lead.

A play in that scoring barrage ended up on SportsCenter’s Top 10 as the No. 3 play of the night, an acrobatic layup in transition in which Bertrand jumped over a Georgia Tech defender and whirled his arms to release the ball as it danced off the backboard and through the net.

Illinois had a six-point advantage, and the game might as well have been over with a frenzied home crowd on its side.

“I just went up and he was under me,” Bertrand said. “I didn’t know he fell down or anything. It really ignited the crowd.”

Paul and Griffey tried to gather the team after the exhilarating play, but even they basked in the moment.

Bertrand finished the game as the team’s co-leading scorer with Paul at 15 points. Three days earlier against Gardner-Webb, Groce interrupted his substitution flow and kept Bertrand in the game for most of the second half, instead of point guard Tracy Abrams.

“He was playing too well for me to take him out,” Groce said.

The national notoriety brought attention to Bertrand, as did his startup on Twitter, @iJoeTales, where the junior raked in 3,000 followers in the first 48 hours of the account’s existence.

The SportsCenter highlight reels, the new Twitter handle, his performance against Georgia Tech: all signs that he’s arrived now in a big way.

Joseph Bertrand’s day was always coming, and three years after landing on campus, he’s leading Illinois with the rest of his 2009 classmates, with a certain flair that only he can concoct.

Thomas can be reached at [email protected] and @ThomasBruch.