Kdug

Yup, our bigs were good. Need some better production out of our guards. Excluding JHS, guards went 0-8 from 3 and 2-12 from the field.

On the bright side, if he’s allowed to play next year, that’d answer the PG question and significantly raise the floor for next year. Would’ve been nice to get him back this year, but he was probably going to be playing limited minutes the rest of the way if he did play.

I guess I just haven’t seen anything or heard anything that makes me think he’d think of transferring. But in today’s game, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised if anyone transfers. But yeah, there are a ton of minutes available next year. I’d say the only starting spot that seems locked down is Galloway’s. Malik might be starter #2, but he needs to get better at not fouling if he’s going to play more than 15-20 minutes a game. So at a minimum 3 starting spots are up for grabs. I’d imagine that a starting role at a high profile, major conference program has to be attractive to the top transfers.

I’d be very surprised, and honestly disappointed if Bates transfers. The only returning player who’s played more minutes than him is Galloway. I know he’s struggled in conference play, but I still think he has the potential to be a good player.

Wisconsin just doesn’t have a go to scorer. I can see why they’ve struggled this year.

With Rutgers losing to Minnesota, the path to a double bye is pretty clear now. We need to win, and any of Iowa, Northwestern, or Maryland has to lose. Anything else and the best we can do is a 5 seed.

So there's obviously a lot going on that can impact IU's NCAA seed and B1G tournament seed. I thought I'd try to summarize some of the stuff that could end up mattering: NCAA Tourney Quadrants Scenarios: IU has some games that are currently on the edge of two quadrants. If any of these move up/down, that could change how a game is classified on the team sheets. Not sure how much this matters, but I'd guess it would have at minimum a small impact Just outside of Q1 Wins: Home vs Michigan St (31 NET), Rutgers (32 NET), Illinois (36 NET) Loss: Home vs Iowa (33 NET) If any of these teams move into the top 30, they'd go from a Q2 to Q1 game at home The teams that are at the back of the top 30 (excluding IU) are Virginia, Iowa State, and Boise State. Any poor performances from these teams would help the B1G teams move up. Just inside Q2 Home win vs Wisconsin (75 NET). If Wisconsin drops to 76 in the NET, they would move to a Q3 win. Just inside Q3 Away win vs Minnesota (240 NET). If Minnesota drops to 241, they would move to a Q4 game. B1G Double Bye Scenarios: I think there are two scenarios where IU gets a double bye. This assumes IU wins vs Mich, Iowa wins vs Neb, PU wins vs Ill, and Rutgers wins at Minny. Iowa, Rutgers and PU should be sizeable favorites in each of those games, and none of this matters if IU doesn't beat Michigan. Obviously anything can happen in conference play, but it's pretty hard to look at every single scenario, so I'm trying to limit it to the likely ones. 3 seed if: Rutgers wins vs NW and Mich wins at Ill (regardless of MD at PSU result) 4 seed if: PSU wins vs MD and Ill wins vs Mich (regardless of NW at Rutgers result) Rooting Guide: There can be conflicting interests in some of the remaining B1G games. But here's my best guess at a rooting guide for the remaining B1G games that can either help IUs B1G and NCAA seeding, or help one without hurting the other: Root for Rutgers to beat NW. Helps IUs B1G seed, and could help get home vs Rutgers into a Q1 win Root for Penn State to beat Maryland. Helps IUs B1G seed, no impact on NCAA tourney quads Root for MSU to handily beat OSU. No impact to B1G seeding (assuming MSU vs Minnesota game is not rescheduled) and could bump the win vs MSU at home into Q1 Root against Purdue. While this is always good advice, If Wisconsin and Illinois both play well against Purdue, it will help our home win vs Wisconsin remain in Q2, and our home win vs Illinois move up to Q1.

Right, still firmly on the 4 seed line, but based on the ones that are updated we'd actually fall just behind Xavier and drop to the #3 overall 4 seed (we were the #1 overall 4 seed before Iowa).

I honestly have no idea whether we've moved up or down since the bracket reveal, but I just wanted to clarify the bold part. Bracket Matrix updates daily, but that does not mean that all of the individual predictions would be up to date. If you look at the date each individual prediction was updated, about half were last updated 2/27 or 2/28, i.e. before the Iowa lost. It's probably a safe assumption that some of those will drop us down once they update their rankings, especially the ones that still have us predicted as a 3 seed. The general consensus of the brackets that are updated after the Iowa loss seems to be a 4 seed, but there are some 5 seed projections starting to show up, along with one 3 seed and two 6 seed outliers.

Yeah, Race definitely struggled to start the season. But I thought he was starting to play better after the Rutgers game. The 10 minutes he played at Iowa before he got hurt was probably the best all-around stretch he had played all year.

I think I'd land around this. If I knew XJ was going to essentially miss the entire conference season at the start of the year, plus the injuries to JHS, TJD, and Race, I would have had lower expectations to start the year. Looking at it by player: Exceeded Expectations: TJD, JHS, Galloway, and Kopp - especially the first 3. Kopp has also been much better this year, though there are still just some bad matchups for him. Met Expectations: Non-JHS Freshmen - Malik has been up and down like most freshman, but has shown some flashes of good play to build on. Never expected CJ and Kaleb to get much playing time, but they have shown good effort and some potential in the limited minutes they've got. Did not meet expectations: Geronimo and Bates - Both have shown flashes of good play, but have been struggling for about a month now. Geronimo was playing well before his injury, so maybe that has something to do with it. Bates had some promising games early, but seems to have just hit a wall. Still think both have potential to improve over the offseason and be contributors next year. Incomplete: Leal, Duncomb, Race, XJ - XJ has obviously missed most of the year, and it's tough to judge Race post injury. To me it looks like Race just isn't the same player now vs pre-injury. Leal and Duncomb basically never saw the floor, and are now injured. Neither was really projected to be in the rotation. It'd be huge if either could develop into a useable bench piece for next year.

IMO it makes 0 sense to talk about next year's team when this season is still going on, and we have no idea what the roster will even look like. Last year's Illinois team would be a good comp to this year's IU team. They were a 4 seed who lost their entire starting 5. This year's Illinois team is currently projected as an 8 seed, and of their 5 best players only 1 was even on the roster last March. Roster building is way different than it was even 5 years ago. You can add serious impact players through the transfer portal, or even add impact freshman after coaches are fired at the end of the year. It's probably safe to say IU won't be a national title contender next year, but that doesn't mean they can't field a solid team.

Well, that was a horrible game all around. We were bad on defense and offense, they had a lot of open shots, but also hit the tough ones, we missed most of our open shots. Recipe for a disaster. A few other thoughts: 1. After the Purdue game we didn't all of a sudden become favorites to win the national title, just like we aren't some horrible team now. Bad games happen, it's all about how the team responds. 2. We need to figure out rebounding. 5 of our 6 worst offensive rebounding %'s of the season have come in the last 6 games. Especially in a game like this where they were missing open shots, getting offensive rebounds is one way to keep the offensive efficiency up. Our defensive rebounding has also been an issue in the last 4 games, albeit to a lesser extent. 3. I can understand Murray getting his. He's a future NBA player who is too fast for our bigs, and too big for our guards. However, Perkins getting 23 was very disappointing. It felt like almost all of his points came from defensive lapses that led to layups or fouls to prevent a layup. Just the defensive lapses on Perkins would probably be enough to make this a 10 point game instead of 22.

I think it’s just a rotation, but not 100% sure. At this point, it is what it is, and I doubt the conference sees it as a big enough issue to implement any sort of change. I think it does take away a bit of the meaning of conference championships when nobody is playing the same schedule. Seemed way better when you could point to the exact set of games that was difference between you and the conference champs as the reason they won and you didn’t. Now it’s partially about who you do/don’t play and who other teams do/don’t play. Although I don’t like conference expansion, schedules should actually be more balanced once the B1G gets to 20 teams. Then you play everyone once, and maybe a rival twice or just rotate the team who you play twice. Still could be some differences based on who you play home vs road, but at least everyone is playing all but one team the same number of games. Heck, at that point I’d rather go to 19 games and throw in 1 neutral court game for everyone. Then you just play everyone once.

Agreed on both. They absolutely don't look at past years in seeding, and the Big Ten reputation for underperforming is all based on not winning a title recently, and the top seeds underperforming. The middle of the pack B1G teams have actually performed pretty well relative to expectations. If you look at the 7-11 seeds, the big ten hasn't lost a first round game since 11 seeded Michigan in 2016. That includes a sample of 13 teams with those seeds since 2017 who have all advanced past the first round. On the flip side, the top seeds have struggled. Three 5 seeds, one 2 seed, one 4 seed, and one 6 seed all lost in round one during that same timeframe.

JHS with an all-time game. Honorable mention to Galloway

The fix is in!

Agreed that the short rotation probably led to some tired legs last night, particularly with TJD. The issue is that I think Woodson has needed to keep a short bench and ride TJD and JHS. Our bench production has been very inconsistent, and in many roads games non-existent. If TJD played 32 minutes in some of the past games instead of 39/40, we probably have a few more losses and would be a bubble team.

I think the point is that everyone is rooting for IU to win every game. But with the heavy minutes TJD and JHS have been playing, adding 3 or 4 games in as many days might reduce their effectiveness in the NCAA tourney and ultimately hurt IU's NCAA tournament performance. I'll be rooting for them to do well in both, but the ultimate prize in my mind is doing well in the NCAA tourney. I honestly put as much weight in some of the bigger early season tournaments like the Maui Invitational as I do in the B1G tourney. I want to win those tournaments, but a loss in those tournaments feels like a slightly more impactful regular season loss vs a loss in the NCAA tournament is devastating.

I'm really hoping we can get XJ back for Saturday's game, even if he only plays a few minutes like Race did in his first game back. I think it was Feb 16 when Coach Woodson said he was a week or two away from returning, so Saturday would be right in that range. That'd also give him 3 regular season games plus at least one B1G tourney game to get back in the swing of things. As we've seen lately, our depth is severely lacking. Adding XJ back into the mix means either him or Galloway can come off the bench and give us some bench production that's been severely lacking lately. That's going to be crucial if we want to make any sort of a run in the tourney.

With the way IU gets it’s production, I just don’t think we’ll win many games when TJD plays that poorly. He’s been so consistently good that it was easy to take for granted, but that shows what happens when he has a bad game. I also think it’s time to give someone else a chance in lieu of Bates. I’d like to see Banks and/or Gunn get some of his minutes to see what they can provide.

Bates has been struggling for awhile now. Honestly, I’d say it’s overdue to give someone else a chance now. Bates hasn’t provided much on either end, so I really don’t see the risk.

Honestly, just sit TJD at this point. He clearly doesn’t have it and might as well get him some rest at this point.

Maybe it’s a cumulative effect, but he’s looked the same as he did in the first half. Just a really poor game from him from the start

This might be the first time since Arizona or Kansas, but our front court has been thoroughly outplayed thus far.