Welcome back to Year 2 of trying to write team previews that don’t suck. You can find your per-game stats, a roster roll call, and the typical coachspeak in any of the preseason magazines. Those are great for telling you the who and the what. I’m going to project each team’s final KenPom ranking, their conference offensive and defensive rankings, and delve into the why. If you enjoy what you read, tell a friend and drop your e-mail address to sign up for free to be alerted when new posts go up.
Illinois Fighting Illini
Projected Final KenPom Ranking: #32 (-12 from last season)
Projected Final Big Ten Rankings: 5th offense/6th defense
No team in the Big Ten went through a bigger makeover this offseason than Illinois. Kofi Cockburn, Trent Frazier, and Da’Monte Williams were program staples and Alfonso Plummer and Jacob Grandison were impact transfers. All have moved on, plus fizzled breakout candidate Andre Curbelo. Only one player who started multiple games is back.
Cockburn’s departure is arguably the biggest sustained in the conference given how much metaphorical (but perhaps also physical) gravity he brought on both ends of the floor. He had to be accounted for in ways that clearly impacted what opponents did. Whatever Illinois looks like this season, it won’t resemble the past three which makes them particularly tricky to predict.
The roster is heavy on talent but it’s oddly balanced. Their two returning rotation pieces, Coleman Hawkins and RJ Melendez, are forwards. So are Terrance Shannon and Matthew Mayer, their big pulls from the transfer portal. So is Ty Rodgers, one of their freshman from a top 10 class. Meanwhile the backcourt is… a freshman coming off an ACL injury (Skyy Clark) and Luke Goode? Or another freshman in Jayden Epps or Sencire Harris?
The Big Ten had some highly rated freshmen last season: Caleb Houstan, Max Christie, Moussa Diabate, Bryce McGowens, Malaki Branham, Kobe Bufkin, and Frankie Collins were all top 50 guys. But it’s fair to say that all four of their teams (Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State, and Nebraska) underperformed expectations despite three of them featuring a bona fide star.
The Illini bring in the #10 class this year with four 4* recruits and are going to need at least one, likely two to step up. To be clear, freshmen stepping up means being in the mix to win the league. The talent on the court and on the bench — Brad Underwood has made the tournament at three schools playing three different styles — gives them a high floor. The play of the freshmen is the difference between a 14-6 league champion and a 12-8 squad that earns a 5 or 6 seed.
Shannon and Mayer are veteran players with years of elite defensive coaching under their belt coming from Texas Tech and Baylor respectively. That’s important for an otherwise young roster working out their roles. I liked Hawkins on the floor as a springy stretch 4 who could fly in for a putback or a rebound or a block. I don’t know that I like him as a smallball 5. It could be that it works great against teams that lack a true big like Michigan State or Penn State but finds the sledding tough against Purdue, Michigan, and Indiana with their established centers. Then it will depend how it works against the league’s middle class, the Derrick Walkers and Steven Crowls.
If you scroll the Illinois Dark Web you’ll find a lot of chatter about Dain Dainja, the other 6-9 transfer from Baylor. He redshirted in 2020-21 and played nine total mop-up minutes for the Bears before transferring. He’s the traditional center on the roster and my blank-slate assumption is that he’ll be decent defensively and limited to dunks and putbacks offensively. Which isn’t a knock: if he can replicate Zed Key’s freshman year, for instance, Illinois should be thrilled. But like so much of this team, it’s an unknown.
The glut of wings and forwards also stifles the breakout campaign for Melendez. He was hyper efficient in his limited time last season, but it’s worth noting that Underwood was extremely judicious with his usage. More than 33% of his Big Ten minutes came in two games against Northwestern, for example. It’s good that he took advantage but important to remember that he wasn’t put into rough matchups and asked to do a lot. He can thrive in the same role this season.
The puzzle is this: Absent Cockburn, Underwood’s teams have almost always been better offensively than defensively. He fashioned the #1 offense at Oklahoma State without any NBA talent. But that was a veteran roster that had all played together, albeit under a different coach. This year in Champaign is a half dozen new pieces coming together. What’s that look like?
It’s the Big Ten’s Rorschach test. Is the offense an imbalanced system dependent on a freshman point guard, or is it simply too much talent with too good of a coach not to work? Is the defense bound for a big fall without Cockburn or will Underwood maximize Shannon and Mayer’s defensive strengths?
I hate starting this series with a team I’m so unsure about. If I’m wrong and they’re better it’s because Skyy Clark is ready right away or Underwood figures a way to mesh the pieces into a sort of positionless harmony. A lineup of (say) Rodgers, Shannon, Melendez, Mayer, Hawkins would be super switchable on defense and able to create mismatches on smaller guards offensively. The 2021 Maryland team that fell backwards into this style sticks in my mind, and this Illinois team is more talented across the board. I’m not sure that’s a switch you can just flip, though. So I’m sort of splitting the difference and saying they’ll be solid on both ends of the court with enough holding them back (youth, post-Kofi scramble to figure out the interior defense) to prevent them from challenging for the league title.
Indiana Hoosiers
Projected Final KenPom Ranking: #22 (+26 from last season)
Projected Final Big Ten Rankings: 6th offense/3rd defense
The Hoosiers are the chic pick to win the league but (spoilers!) I do not have them as my projected top-rated team. Most analysts picking them seem to arrive there by default. Once they’re finished picking everyone else’s nits, and EVERYONE has nits, they land on the veteran team with the preseason All-American.
But man. If Michigan doesn’t blow a 17 point lead in the Big Ten tournament is anyone picking Indiana to win the conference? If they lost that game, could you distinguish Mike Woodson’s first season from the ones that got the fans upset with Archie Miller? They dropped five of their last season Big Ten games, beating only Maryland and Minnesota. A complaint about Miller was he never had a winning record in the Big Ten. Woodson’s crew went 9-11 last season. They finished at #48 in KenPom in 2022. Miller finished #50 in 2021.
Now they’re running it back with the same core and they’re the favorite? Yes, the rest of the league appears to have gotten weaker around them. And yes, they add a top-10 recruiting class. Woodson entering Year 2 matters, too. I do think they’re going to be better. And the Big Ten might be so jumbled that the Hoosiers could… crap, now I’m doing it.
It’s boring but true: it really is anyone’s league to win at the top. So what has to happen for Indiana to get there? Making sure the defense plays at an elite level again is a good start. The correct answer to my question above distinguishing Miller from Woodson is that the defense was better in almost every way:
The frontcourt of Trayce Jackson-Davis and Race Thompson is just sturdy. It’s almost a sneaky sort of physicality. Wyoming made the tournament last season because they bullied the Mountain West Conference. Their starters in the First Four game against Indiana ranged from 6-5 to 6-10, all but one weighing at least 200 pounds. No matter: Indiana dominated them on the boards and completely short-circuited their offense, causing 19 turnovers. Despite a 2-13 performance from behind the arc, the Hoosiers cruised to the win.
At their best that’s what they can do, even against Big Ten offenses. They held the high-powered Purdue offense more or less in check twice. After their comeback over Michigan, they shut down the Illinois offense in Indianapolis. Players not named Kofi Cockburn shot 4-for-21 on two pointers in that game. Indiana may run into some worse defensive three point shooting luck but this still projects as a top 3 defense in the league.
Which will come in handy because the offense still has a ceiling. Even with a cheat code in TJD inside, the Hoosiers got bogged down way too often. Jackson-Davis and Thompson attempted nearly half of all the Hoosiers’ two pointers. Combined, they made 59.4% of them. Despite that, they still ranked 11th in the conference in that department. Two of their biggest offenders here are gone but there was still a bit too much Xavier Johnson heroball last season.
Enter Jalen Hood-Schifino. He’s a top-25 prospect and gives Johnson the backcourt running mate that was sorely missing last season. Parker Stewart was Indiana’s best outside shooter but his one dimensional game was a drag on the offense. Hood-Schifino instantly gives them another threat to make something happen with the ball in his hands. Stewart, Miller Kopp, and Tamar Bates were not making plays last year.
Of course, I did just warn above in the Illinois section to tread lightly with freshmen, especially the combo of adding a highly touted one to a team with an established star. There could be a Houstan-with-Dickinson or Branham-with-Liddell thing here, where even if it works it doesn’t live up to the inflated expectations. Hood-Schifino fits right in physically but it doesn’t seem like he’s going to quench Indiana’s biggest thirst (perimeter shooting).
“Trayce Jackson-Davis is going to expand his game and shoot threes” is the new “Ethan Happ is going to expand his game and shoot threes,” which is to say I’ll believe it when I see it. Thompson is a more willing shooter but he’s only made a quarter of his attempts in his career. Johnson is decent but not a sniper. Bates and Trey Galloway don’t bring that to the table. Kopp’s reputation as a shooter outweighs his actual production. His career mark of 36% is good but not so good that he commands minutes given that he doesn’t fit the defensive identity of the rest of the roster.
Jordan Geronimo does and would be my pick to start on the wing even without much of a three point shot himself. He’s a terrific athlete who should benefit the most from a second playmaker in Hood-Schifino taking the floor. Unfortunately it seems like the fifth starting spot is a tossup between Kopp and Bates.
I like the core lineup of Johnson, Hood-Schifino, Thompson, and Jackson-Davis leaning into a defense-first philosophy that forces other teams to work hard to score. I just can’t get there with the offense and with the depth. TJD is elite inside but the lack of floor spacing limits how much better he can be. The offense also won’t be helped if he’s stepping out and making 30% of however many three pointers he actually attempts. If the offense cracks the top 5 of the league I would be surprised. To truly get there and contend for the title I think one of TJD or Thompson would need to develop a reliable perimeter shot which I’m not buying.
I see Indiana very safely in the tournament barring a poorly timed injury. Their Big Ten schedule is backloaded: their final five are against Illinois, Michigan State, Purdue, Iowa, and Michigan, all teams that should also be in the field. So just get your work done in January and early February, Hoosiers.
Iowa Hawkeyes
Projected Final KenPom Ranking: #27 (-14 from last season)
Projected Final Big Ten Rankings: 1st offense/8th defense
Yup, it’s a Fran McCaffrey team. Iowa’s been the top offense in the Big Ten the past two seasons and despite losing another NPOY caliber player they’re set up to do it again. A lot of coaches talk about getting winning DNA into their program; Fran lives it, literally. It’s a family affair in Iowa City. Kris Murray got some draft buzz — being the identical twin of the player who went #4 has its perks — but returned to school as the most obvious breakout candidate in the country. His numbers as a sophomore compare extremely favorably to Keegan’s as a freshman before he exploded last season:
There wasn’t a better offensive player in the country last season than Keegan Murray. There wasn’t even anybody close. In fact nobody in the KenPom era (since 2004) had ever posted a 130+ offensive rating on 28% possession usage or higher. So Kris isn’t going to get to that level, but he doesn’t need to for Iowa to be elite on offense.
Iowa’s secret sauce the past two seasons has been an allergy to turnovers. They led the country in that category in 2021 and ranked 3rd last season, avoiding the offensive drop-off that seemed guaranteed post-Luka Garza. They were a good, but not lethal, perimeter shooting team in 2022 and with Keegan and Jordan Bohannon moving on they’ll be even more reliant on creating easy buckets from the attention Kris Murray draws.
The shooting even borders on a minor concern, which is a weird thing to write about Iowa. Kris can shoot (38% from three last season) and there are high hopes for Payton Sandfort (37%) but neither McCaffrey brother is a sniper nor is the backcourt pairing of Tony Perkins and Ahron Ulis. But they call can shoot, and even center Filip Rebraca is a 32% shooter for his career. It’s not a disaster that Joe Toussaint (27% for his career) transferred, is what I’m saying. It’s maybe not a top 50 three point shooting team but the floor is established. The other good news is all of them take care of the ball and with Iowa’s focus on offensive rebounding — in ten of McCaffrey’s twelve seasons they’ve ranked in the top 100 — they’ll make up for some extra misses with volume.
Perkins’ ascension to the starting lineup really solidified this squad last season. He’s another steady presence on offense and a pest on defense. The Hawkeyes will miss Toussaint’s steals and Rebraca isn’t much of a rim protector, but they’ll have excellent size and length. McCaffrey teams used to be in the top 50 on defense before Jordan Bohannon got on campus. Major addition by subtraction on that side of the ball.
Iowa’s going to figure it out offensively, that’s just an assumption you make until they don’t. I don’t love the complementary pieces but I expect Kris Murray to be one of the five best players in the league. The defense, which was actually 5th in the conference during league play, won’t be quite that good without Toussaint and the ability to play both Murrays together, but it should be borderline top 50. All of that adds up to a winning conference record, though McCaffrey is going to be judged on their performance in March.
Up next: Maryland, Michigan, Michigan State