Big Ten Basketball power rankings: Michigan State, Wisconsin takes big jumps
By Joey Loose
6. Indiana (8-2, 1-1)
Things are pretty easy for first-year head coach Mike Woodson when you have a player like Trayce Jackson-Davis, who’s averaging 19.3 points and 8.4 rebounds per game to this point. Jackson-Davis is the star of a show that features a number of transfers, as the Hoosiers nabbed Xavier Johnson from Pittsburgh and Miller Kopp from Northwestern and have gotten solid play out of both of them. Some expected the Hoosiers to be a top 25 team this season, and this still could come to pass in the coming weeks.
They’ve lost a couple of tough road games, but the Hoosiers have mostly taken care of things to this point. The initial negative for Indiana is that they don’t have any impressive wins, with St. John’s the biggest one on the resume, and that they haven’t won a game away from Assembly Hall. They dropped a double overtime thriller at Syracuse and fell at Wisconsin a week ago. The defense has played at an elite level at times and sits just inside the top 20 in efficiency this season.
Indiana is talented and has a real star in Jackson-Davis. They are going to get opportunities for some nice wins down the stretch; it may come down to how Woodson fares in his first years as a collegiate head coach after all those years in the NBA. The Hoosiers have struggled in recent years, but this might be the most talented team they’ve had since Tom Crean was on the sidelines. As long as that defense keeps churning, the Hoosiers should be a contender in this deep Big Ten if everything comes together.