Big Ten basketball: 2018 Conference Tournament preview

The Big Ten Basketball Tournament is a week early this season so action will get under way at the Madison Square Garden on Wednesday. With a top-heavy league, who’s poised to win it all?

Michigan State is your 2018 outright Big Ten Regular Season Champions. It’s exactly what everyone saw coming. The four sophomores stayed together all season. Other players besides the star stepped up and they’re poised.

It was up and down for the Spartans for sure. They battled like crazy against Duke at the beginning of the season. After that loss, they clearly looked like the second best team. Two losses came in early January to good Big Ten Teams. Since then, Michigan State didn’t lose. Certainly they look like the team we thought they were going to be in the preseason.

This league started with Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern and Purdue all ranked. Of those four, two will be in the top-25 along with a possibility of Ohio State and Michigan.

The biggest story that has come out of the Big Ten this season has to be the underperformance of some teams and the emergence of others.

Let’s start with Northwestern and what happened to them. The Wildcats scoring numbers on both sides of the ball stayed the same. That’s an issue because Northwestern is ranked north of 200 in scoring offense and the Wildcats really thought they were going to be an offensive threat.

Depth was one area that was going to hurt the Wildcats. That’s exactly what happened this season and it translated into a disappointing year. On paper, Northwestern has a great starting five. The first three players off the bench though are underclassmen and it really showed this season.  Only two guys shot double-digit three-pointers off the bench and only one averaged over five points.