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.

He’s in a foreign place, a basketball court in Spokane, Wash. He’s the leading scorer and one of the captains of an emergent team on the college basketball scene. The analysts aren’t in his corner; they’ve picked his team to lose against the home squad, then No. 10 Gonzaga.

He’s standing in the corner behind the 3-point arc early in the first half with his team already facing a substantial deficit. He catches the basketball whizzing toward his corner as a group of 1,200 rowdy students, who have relentlessly heckled him and his teammates on Twitter in the approaching days before the game, yell behind him. He gathers himself, releasing the ball in rhythm despite a defender’s hand squarely in his face. Swish.

He’s Brandon Paul, and he’s not quite done scoring yet.

That first 3-pointer from Paul on Saturday night marked the first points of an offensive masterpiece that carried the newly No. 10-ranked Illinois men’s basketball team to a 85-74 win over the Gonzaga Bulldogs.

Masterpiece isn’t a dose of hyperbole. Paul finished with 35 points on 10-for-16 field goals, 5-for-9 from 3-point range and 10-for-11 from the free-throw line. The production came from everywhere: the 3-ball, the fast break, dribble drives and the skilled lay-ins around tall centers.

If it seemed like he was unguardable at times, Gonzaga head coach Mark Few would nod and agree.

“We just did not have a guy that could guard him one-on-one,” Few said after the game. “I thought he looked exceptional. He looked like a high-level NBA guy.”

Paul has been prone to offensive outbursts before. He recorded a couple 20-point games his freshman year, and last season he amassed a career-high 43 points in a win against No. 5 Ohio State at Assembly Hall.

Despite the transcendent performance in which Paul launched 3-pointers that appeared destined to sink in, there wasn’t much talk about Paul by the end of the season. Or the Illini, for that matter. That’s what losing 12 out of the last 14 games will garner, and Paul played erratically amidst his team’s slump.

Illinois’ undefeated record this season has Paul’s fingerprints all over it. Instead of erratic descision-making and silly shot selection, Paul has provided a steadying force to a team under a new head coach and averaged 19.5 points per game while taking on some of the point guard duties. Rarely do those points feel forced, and often they arrive at critical junctures in the game.

The steadying nature of Paul’s play was seen in Spokane on Saturday with his team down early. After the first 3-pointer, Paul missed his next three shots that he deemed “wide-open.” Recognizing his lukewarm start, Paul, instead, insisted on taking it to the basket, using the pick-and-roll to blow by mismatched defenders.

“I wanted to get to the free-throw line at least eight times. That was my goal for that game,” Paul said. “I did that.”

The early deficit in a hostile environment did little to waver the senior’s game plan. Paul said he felt no pressure to hurry, rallying his teammates around the idea that the averages would surely start to tilt in the Illini’s favor.

“We knew that they made their run,” Paul said. “It was halfway through the first half and we weren’t playing that well, and we were only down by five points. We knew that once our shots started falling and we started playing our basketball that it was going to be a different game.”

Once Paul buried Gonzaga late in the game, his candidacy as a national player of the year began to rush forward. A Grantland writer said “it was the best individual performance by anyone, at any school” so far this season. Paul was then named Big Ten Player of the Week as well as the Oscar Robertson National Player of the Week.

Illinois men’s basketball head coach John Groce said all of the accolades were deserved, but Paul merely shrugged off the mere mention of them.

“I’m just going to play and win as much games as possible,” Paul said. “If those individual goals come, that’s going to be good. As long as I can look back on our season and feel like it’s a good season, that’s good with me.”

Paul is going to have fun winning as much games a possible, too. The endearing image after the game was a jubilant Paul, flashing the “call me” hand signal, apparently to the heartbroken Gonzaga student section.

In reality, Paul had spotted a group of girls holding a sign that read: “All I want for Christmas is BP3.”

If Paul keeps his steady season up, he’ll be getting calls from NBA general managers in addition to admiring fans.

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