LAS VEGAS — In the days after Iowa State’s 2024–25 season ended in March, head coach T.J. Otzelberger came to his top potential returners with a message: It’s your team now.
The Cyclones used the transfer portal to fill in gaps, but Otzelberger made it clear there was no superstar incoming. Tamin Lipsey (the team’s heady point guard), Milan Momcilovic (its sharpshooting wing) and Joshua Jefferson (its skilled four-man) had to elevate into starring roles.
The message felt most targeted for Momcilovic. Once the program’s third-highest-rated recruit of all time, the lanky 6' 8" wing popped up on NBA radars after a strong freshman season. He was on every breakout sophomore list at this time last year as a future star in Ames, Iowa. But things didn’t happen as quickly as planned. Momcilovic missed about a month with a hand injury and wasn’t quite the same after returning in February, shooting under 40% from the field in the 13 games after coming back. Between Curtis Jones and Keshon Gilbert, Iowa State graduated over 30 points per game of production in the spring. Iowa State could ill afford for Momcilovic’s development to stagnate; especially if Otzelberger wasn’t going to hunt a top scoring option in the backcourt.
Early returns suggest he has done just that. Momcilovic led all scorers with 23 points in a nailbiting 83–82 victory over St. John’s on Monday to kick off the Players Era Festival, and proved his mettle as a top offensive option for the Cyclones in a high-level showdown that easily could’ve resembled a late-March matchup.
“I knew that this year, I just had to take a step up,” Momcilovic says. “I can’t average just 11, 12 points this year. I had to average more. I’ve got to score for this team to be successful and I worked hard this offseason to polish my game a bit more.”
Momcilovic was the most effective offensive player in the game. His best skill remains his three-point shot, and he drilled five of Iowa State’s nine threes, including some timely ones. But Momcilovic’s game-high performance was marked by his clear growth as more than just a shooter.
His first bucket of the game, fewer than three minutes in, was a difficult contested fadeaway jumper over the outstretched arms of a St. John’s defender. And his last, in a critical moment after St. John’s had taken an 80–79 lead and Lipsey had left the game with a leg injury, was a smooth drive past Dillon Mitchell (St. John’s best defender) and an acrobatic scooped layup over Zuby Ejiofor that gave Iowa State the lead for good.
“I don’t think I’ve ever made that [layup] ever,” Momcilovic quipped in a postgame sideline interview with TNT.
But it’s plays like that that truly demonstrate Momcilovic’s growth from sophomore to junior year, a monthslong journey from those end-of-season meetings to the bright lights of Feast Week. Otzelberger called Momcilovic “a tremendous worker” whose everyday approach this spring helped him raise his game. Meanwhile, Momcilovic credited his head coach for the way he poured into him this spring, giving him the confidence to fire away without the added pressure of the team needing his scoring.
“He just has a calmness to him that you feel like he doesn’t [put] a lot of pressure on you,” Momcilovic says. “He obviously wants a lot for me, but he does it where it’s not like he’s going to put so much pressure on you that you have to make every shot.”
Half of Otzelberger’s battle is getting Momcilovic to just take every shot. When Momcilovic was just 2-for-6 from the field against Mississippi State, it was the six attempts his coaches fixated on, not the two makes. Momcilovic, like many shooters, had a tendency in his first two years at Iowa State to vanish from games if shots didn’t fall early. Part of the investment Otzelberger made in him to help carry the offense is continuing to shoot with confidence, even when shots aren’t falling.
“They were mad at that [2-for-6 game] because they wanted 2-for-13, 2-for-14,” Momcilovic said. “They just want me to shoot the ball. It doesn’t matter if I make it or miss it. The percentages will eventually play it out.”
“As his coach, you want to do everything you can to show that belief in how you can have his back,” Otzelberger said.
And watching Momcilovic be the best player on the floor against a St. John’s team that could easily be rebranded as a portal all-star team had to validate Otzelberger’s decision to go all in with his junior returner. With a shred of the fanfare compared to teams that “won the offseason,” Otzelberger’s veteran nucleus once again has Iowa State looking poised to compete at the top of the Big 12 and with the best of the best in college basketball.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as This Unexpected Feast Week Performance Could Reshape the Big 12 Men’s Basketball Race.
