Big Ten Basketball: One big question for every team entering 2019-20

There’s no real debate as to who the best team in Big Ten Basketball is this season. What are the biggest questions for each of those teams?

Michigan State has the conference’s most recent championship. Its best coach. Its best player (and maybe the nation’s best player). The Spartans are the only Big Ten Basketball that comes into 2019-20 harboring legitimate Final Four hopes.

The rest of the conference is marked by uncertainty. The departure or mainstays like Carsen Edwards, Ethan Happ, Juwan Morgan and John Beilein has created a tightly-crowded chase pack behind Michigan State. This muddled middle-class can be broken up even further: into groups of upper-tier hopefuls, upstarts looking to assert themselves and teams in rebuilding mode.

Some teams belong to more than one of these groups at once. Questions abound for everyone, even the defending champions.

To help clear up this picture, I go through the Big Ten one-by-one, in reverse order of the (unofficial) preseason media poll, to ask one big question of each team.

In such a packed conference, anything that moves the needle even slightly might just be the difference between a team that goes dancing or a team that watches the postseason festivities from their couches. In the 2019-2020 version of the Big Ten, every variable unaccounted for has that much more impact.

Here are some of these variables.