Big Ten Basketball: Breakout candidate from each team for 2020-21 season

Each team in Big Ten Basketball has a number of potential stars that will rise during 2020-21, but only one will be the ‘breakout’ player.

Whether it be personal development, teammates, coaching staff, or a combination that creates the needed circumstances, if a player is going to be good it usually happens. There, unfortunately, is no steadfast definition of the term ‘breakout’ that is universally accepted by the sports world. There is no term that conjures up the same notion of a player’s performance among all individuals who may, or may not have a vested interest.

In order to find commonality, we look toward the authorities on the subject to construct our mind frame and guide us in the right direction. Every year there is an ESPY Award that is handed to the Breakthrough Athlete of the Year. The inaugural recipient of this award was Gary Sheffield in 1993, more recent winners have been Donovan Mitchell in 2018 and Saquan Barkley in 2019.

The general criteria to be considered for this award is for an athlete: who in a given year improves his or her performance dramatically or otherwise becomes well-recognized. This particular definition is as good as any as we discover the player from each team in the Big Ten.

There are two particular terms that help shape what will be considered as a ‘breakthrough’ player. First, players who will ‘improve upon their performance’ is a criterion.  This tends to favor players who may not have had an opportunity or who have been underachieving. When looking ahead, it is a lot easier to state an eight-point per game player is going to improve more than a twenty point per game player.  Granted, if that twenty per game player was to drop thirty a game, it would be quite the breakthrough.

Secondly, ‘otherwise becomes well-recognized’. This inherently also lends itself to players who have performed not as well, for if they were performing well, they would be known already.  Keeping all this in mind, this list consists of zero first-team All-Big Ten players from last year, and there might be a couple of double-digit scorers, at most, that will be mentioned.

This, however, is not a list of players who will ‘do better’ than last year by doubling their scoring average to six from three per game. It is a list of players whose stats will be significantly better as a by-product of their increased importance to their team. The following 14 players are the ones to keep an on this upcoming season in Big Ten Basketball.